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06/03/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The Conservative Action Project, an offshoot of the secretive and influential right-wing Council for National Policy, released a statement Monday signed by a rogues' gallery of right-wing figures demanding faster Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees, claiming that his agenda, aka Project 2025, will suffer unless Senate Republicans step up the pace.

In 2020, the Conservative Action Project energetically promoted Trump’s false claims about the election and participated in his efforts to stay in power after losing the election. The group’s current chair, notorious voter suppression activist Kenneth Blackwell, was involved in behind-the-scenes lobbying to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his power and interfere with congressional affirmation of state-certified Electoral College votes.

The new statement is further evidence of how closely the right-wing movement is aligned with, or maybe in the pocket of, Trump and his inner circle. More than 100 MAGA and religious-right movement leaders signed the statement, including Christian nationalists, voting restriction activists, leaders of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ political groups, right-wing gadfly/power player Ginni Thomas, MAGA judicial activist Mike Davis, and disgraced former southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson.

Also among the signers is Cleta Mitchell, who joined the infamous phone call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s Republican secretary of state into “finding” enough votes to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Mitchell, who now runs right-wing so-called “election integrity” efforts at the Conservative Partnership Institute, recently appeared on dominionist Jim Garlow’s podcast, where she said House passage of the SAVE Act was a result of God telling her to work on the (largely imaginary) “threat” of non-citizen voting.

The Conservative Action Project is one of many right-wing coalitions formed in reaction to the election of former President Barack Obama, and now includes representatives of MAGA groups created in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, like the Center for Renewing America. In 2022 it mobilized an unsuccessful effort to defeat the Respect for Marriage Act, which offers legal protections to same-sex couples whose rights would be threatened if the Supreme Court overturns its 2015 marriage equality ruling.

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Staffers behind Mayorkas impeachment outed as veterans of Christian nationalist groups - Alternet.org

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/11/revealed-new-leaders-of-council-for-national-policy-set-extremist-agenda/

david a

at its first meeting of 2022, the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) laid out its plans for influencing this year’s midterm elections, abolishing abortion rights, defunding the left, limiting China’s influence, and countering a topic of great concern to Republicans: “wokeness.”

According to an agenda obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the CNP meeting took place the last weekend in February at the posh Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California. The agenda reveals  changes in leadership and current priorities of the influential group, which is closelytied to Trump and the Republican Party.

Kevin Roberts, a CNP board member and president of the Heritage Foundation, kicked the event off with a speech on “how the Conservative Movement can go on the offense to promote America’s founding principles across the country.”

CNP is known for “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” as Columbia University Professor Anne Nelson describes the group in her definitive book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

Leadership Changes Elevate Voter Suppression Advocates 

The program for the February meeting offers the first glimpse of the secretive group’s high-level members and leaders since CMDpublished its September 2020 Membership Directory, provided by open source intelligence researcher Brent Allpress.

The group’s Executive Committee is headed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who has taken over from William Walton as CNP’s president. Judicial Watch’s “Election Integrity Project” has pushed for voter roll purges and promotes the myth that voter fraud is widespread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meeting, Fitton facilitated two panels on “election integrity,” CMDreported. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton told meeting attendees, according to videos obtained by The Washington Post.

Another lifelong advocate of voter suppression now serves as CNP’s vice president: J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio and member of Trump’s failed voter fraud panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He currently chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit spin-off of the Trump administration.

In May 2021, Blackwell facilitated an “Action Session” at CNP’s 40th anniversary meeting on how to combat the national voting rights effort, featuring U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential electoral college results, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has promoted Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infamous call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for the former president to win the state.

At its February meeting, CNP hosted a screening of the filmCapitol Punishment with director Chris Burgard, which promotes the claim that, “Everything that we are being told [about the insurrection] is a lie and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie.” CNP has extensive ties to #StoptheSteal and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, CMD reported.

Others joining the CNP executive committee this year include Jerry A. Johnson (treasurer), former president of the National Religious Broadcasters; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieutenant general and executive vice president of theFamily Research Council; Chad Connelly, president of Faith Wins; and Millie Hallow, managing director of executive operations at the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell is also listed as president of the board of directors for CNP Action, and Fitton is a new director of the affiliate.

The Gold Circle Members list is largely similar to the September 2020 directory, with many of the new additions representing shifts from lower membership tiers. Notable new members include Ashland University President Carlos Campo; Lynn Friess, widow of GOP megadonor Foster Friess;and Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center and a vice president at Liberty University.

Politicizing Covid

“The pandemic led to unprecedented government mandates, the erosion of civil liberties, and an outright assault on freedom,” CNP’s agenda booklet argues. “Americans have seen and experienced what unchecked government power can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instrumental in the relentless push from the right to ignore public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. It played a leading role in the anti-lockdown coalition known as “Save Our Country,” with members making up half of its leadership counciland organizing weekly conference calls to coordinate response tactics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affiliate, organized a call to discuss a plan for recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to campaign against Covid public health restrictions.

CNP’s February meeting featured a general session on the state of the pandemic in the U.S. led byDr. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading advocate for herd immunity who has advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on his controversial anti-mask policies.

Focus on Elections 

Despite being a tax-exempt organization barred from engaging in electoral politics, CNP is focusing heavily on elections this year, according to the agenda for its February meeting.

Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, led things off at the Gold Circle Dinner with a presentation on “the most pressing political battles in DC and their impact on the Conservative Movement.”

A general session titled “Virginia 2021: Lessons Learned” featured Chad Connelly, founder and president of Faith Wins; Mark Campbell, campaign manager for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia; Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia; and Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence sharing “their analyses of the Virginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not winning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Republicans in Virginia won the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, while also recapturing the majority in the state House.

Former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, a past president of CNP,  joined the four “Lessons Learned” panelists for a CNP Action session “to chart the course to success nationwide in November.”

In his capacity as CNP Action chairman, Blackwell also hosted “Candidate Introductions” for attendees. While candidates were not listed on the program, CMD obtained a flier for Drew Montez Clark, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 25th district seat in the U.S. House, that was circulated at the meeting.

Clarkreportedly co-organized two buses carrying 100 Floridians to the Jan. 6 rally in DC that led to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. He also spoke at a far-right “America First” rally in April 2021 headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Supreme Court Takes Center Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most consequential ever, and CNP Members have been central to some of the landmark cases being decided,” the CNP’s February meeting program notes. Speakers at a general session on the subject included Alan Sears, founder of the Christian right litigation powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser; and First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford.

“CNP has been strategizing to dominate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nelson told the Associated Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, all run by members of the CNP.”

Dannenfelserwas among 14 other CNP members to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Garden ceremony at the White House where Amy Coney Barrett accepted the nomination for the Supreme Court, solidifying the far-right’s hold on the nation’s highest court.

The agenda notes that Dannenfelser “will provide an update on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could result in completely gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Mississippi’s Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn (R-Miss.), the 2020 chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), touted the Dobbs v. Jacksoncase and its prospects for leading to a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during a panel at the CNP meeting last May, CMD reported.

“We think that’s going to be a landmark case. All of us know that the United States Supreme Court composition has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meeting attendees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most active, pro-life people in America, so we believe that she brings a new dynamic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be transformative in the arena in abortion. We’re proud of that.”

Dannenfelser then led a CNP Action panel “on how the Conservative Movement can be best equipped for the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs” and to “strategize on messaging, state legislation, and more with attendees.”

One of the panelists,Mike Thompson, is a senior vice president with CRC Advisors. Leonard Leo,who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges, founded CRC Advisors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.” As of September 2020, Leo was aBoard of Governors member of CNP.

Pushing Back Against China, the Left, and a “Woke” Military 

Placing China “at the heart of the greatest challenges facing the United States in recent years”—from Covid to currency manipulation, climate policies, and “undue influence over American corporations”—Economic War Room host Kevin Freeman led a discussion titled “The 21st: An American or Chinese Century?”

Freeman was joined in the panel by Beau Brunson, Consumers’ Research Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs. Consumers’ Research has committed millions in dark money to fight environmental, social, and corporate governance concerns (ESG) and “woke” capitalism, where BlackRock has emerged as a top target of its campaign for its “hypocritical” investments in China.

CMD recently exposed Consumers’ Research as one of the largest sponsors of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican treasurers, auditors, and staff from 16 states, which has  also prioritized fighting the ESG movement and “woke” capitalism.

Also on the panel were Pete Hoekstra, former ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump, and Steve Milloy, a FoxNews contributor and paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and other corporations.

The three also participated in a CNP Action panel on “Countering China,” where they collectively worked “on ways to combat the increasing and pervasive threat China poses to the United States and American life.”

Leading an CNP Action panel discussion on “Defunding the Left,”Buckeye InstitutePresident and CEO Robert Altfacilitated a tutorial on how to cut off contributions to “left-wing causes” by targeting public employee unions, trial lawyers, and investment management firms. O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, and Bridgett Wagner, vice president of policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, joined the discussion.

New CNP Executive Member Boykin led a panel discussion focused on the question: “Can a Woke Military Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s general counsel, and Keith Kellogg, retired Army lieutenant general and co-chair of AFPI’s Center for American Security. The three talked about “extreme policies [that] have been implemented through the Department of Defense” and “how woke ideologies have influenced our armed services.”

Two other CNP meetings are scheduled for this year, May 18–20 in McLean, VA, and September 15–17 in Frisco, TX.

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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch**/2016/05**/17/council-national-policy-behind-curtain

MARCH 2016

NO LNX GFX DOCS

in  this article

CNP: The Hardliners

CNP Rules and Regulations

Media & the CNP

Higher Education & the CNP

The Council for National Policy, a highly secretive group, is a key venue where mainstream conservatives and extremists mix.

For 35 years, a shadowy and intensely secretive group has operated behind the scenes, providing a venue three times a year for powerful American politicians and others on the right to meet privately to build the conservative movement.

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is, in the words of The New York Times, “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country,” an organization so tight-lipped that it tells its people not to admit membership or even name the group. It is important enough that last fall, according to an account in The National Review, Donald Trump and five other Republican presidential candidates each took 30 minutes to address the group; the conservative journal reported that Trump was by far the favorite candidate.

The names of many members and officers of the group have leaked over the years, and some of its officers are reported on the organization’s tax forms. But the last time long lists of its members was made public was in 1998. For the most part since then, members of the CNP — which can be joined only by invitation, at a cost of thousands of dollars — have managed to keep their identities secret.

That is about to end. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently obtained a copy of the CNP’s 2014 Membership Directory, a 191-page compendium that lists 413 members, 118 members who have died, and 14 past presidents. The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party enthusiasts — but for the many real extremists who are included.

Paul S. Teller, the hardline chief of staff to Ted Cruz who was once described by The Hill as Cruz’s “agitator in chief,” is a member, or at least he was in 2014. Tony Perkins, the head of the LGBT-bashing Family Research Council, was its vice president that year, one of three executive officers. And Frank Gaffney, whose group provided Trump with bogus statistics about American Muslims’ support for violent jihad and who was a senior adviser to Cruz until May, was a member, too.

The CNP’s 2014 vision statement, reproduced at the front of the directory, succinctly lays out its goal: “A united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.”

But it has long been known that the group included some key individuals whose goals are less benevolent. One of its five founders, Tim LaHaye, is the co-author of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels and a man who has described gay people as “vile,” said the Illuminati are conspiring to establish a “new world order,” attacked Catholicism, and once worked for the wildly conspiracist John Birch Society. An important member whose name was revealed early on was John Rousas Rushdoony, who is listed in the 2014 directory’s “In Memoriam” section and advocated for a society ruled by Old Testament law requiring, among other things, the stoning of adulteresses, idolaters and “incorrigible” children.

The following visualizations were created from the Council for National Policy’s (CNP) membership directory. They illustrate the issues that concern individual members and provide a breakdown of shared concerns.

The 2014 CNP members are paragons of the conservative establishment. There are business titans, Christian college presidents, owners and editors of right-wing media outlets, GOP mega-donors, government staffers and leading members of conservative think tanks. There are officials of organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society. There are politicians and political appointees, anti-abortion activists and also some who are less known publicly as conservatives, like Linda L. Bean, who owns L.L. Bean Inc., an outdoorsy clothing company.

But what is most remarkable about the directory is that it reveals how the CNP has become a key meeting place where ostensibly mainstream conservatives interact with individuals who are, by any reasonable definition, genuinely extremist.

Caustic Combinations

Tony Perkins is a good example. He has falsely claimed that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” said that gay people “recruit” children, secretly purchased a mailing list for a candidate he was managing from former Klan leader David Duke, and addressed, in 2001, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (the same group that inspired Dylann Roof’s murder of nine churchgoers last year).

He is hardly alone.

On the CNP’s board of governors, for instance, is Michael Peroutka. Peroutka was for many years on the board of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group that advocates for a newly seceded South ruled by white people. He was also the 2004 presidential candidate for the Constitution Party, a far-right group opposed to abortion in all cases. He has appeared on a white nationalist radio show.

There are several other well-known extremists on the same board of governors. Jerome Corsi is the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry, has written an error-filled book alleging that President Obama was not born in the United States, once described Martin Luther King Jr. as a “shakedown artist,” and is a subscriber to numerous baseless conspiracy theories. In his latest, 2014 book, he claims that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun fled to Argentina after the end of World War II and lived there happily until their deaths.

Another on that board is Joseph Farah, who runs the conspiracist online “news” outlet, "WorldNetDaily" and employs Corsi. When Farah’s site isn’t busy bashing anything vaguely liberal or suggesting that Obama is helping the United Nations create a one-world government, it spends its time doing such vital work as running a six-part series alleging that eating soybeans causes homosexuality.

Also on the board is Mat Staver, leader of the anti-LGBT Liberty Counsel,who has worked for the re-criminalization of gay sex, described the Boy Scouts as a “playground for pedophiles,” and likened LGBT activists to terrorists. And then there’s Alan Sears, founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the co-author of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, which falsely links pedophilia to homosexuality.

These members are listed on the CNP’s board of governors right alongside people who are not particularly known for their political extremism, although they are certainly highly conservative. A leading example is Chad Connelly, the two-term head of the South Carolina Republican Party who left that post in 2013 and is now the Republican National Committee’s national director of faith engagement.

Leaders and Money

The CNP founders, including then-Moral Majority leader Tim LaHaye, were a colorful cast of characters: oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, a one-time member of the John Birch Society’s ruling council and a billionaire before he went bankrupt as a result of his effort to corner the silver market; T. Cullen Davis, a multimillionaire from Texas who was tried and acquitted in two separate murder cases; William Cies, a wealthy John Bircher and major CNP funder; and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The CNP’s latest available tax forms show that the group has a budget of between $1.5 million and $2 million. Eleven years after it was founded in 1981 as a tax-exempt organization, the IRS yanked that status on the grounds that CNP was not run for the benefit of the public. A long legal battle ensued, with the CNP regaining its tax-exempt status after promising to produce a quarterly journal meant to educate the public, although it did not do so until years later. It also launched a website that distributes two publications, Policy Counsel and Heard Around the Hill.

Secrecy was paramount from the first. “Members are told not to discuss the group, reveal the topics discussed in the closed-door meetings, or even say whether or not they are members of the organization,” The Salt Lake City Tribune reported. The membership list is “strictly confidential” and guests may attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee,” according to The New York Times, which also reported that one of its rules was, “The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.”

In the 2014 directory, two other executive officers are listed in addition to Perkins, the CNP’s vice president. They are President Stuart W. Epperson, co-founder of the sprawling conservative radio and online Salem Media Group, whose on-air personality Hugh Hewitt co-moderated some recent GOP presidential debates, and Treasurer John H. Scribante, the CEO of Orion Energy Systems Inc.

Those are not the only wealthy people associated with CNP. Its past presidents, in particular, include many extremely well off businessmen. Among them are Nelson Bunker Hunt; Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway whose net worth was estimated at $5 billion in 2012; and Foster Friess, a stock picker who was recognized in 2011 for contributions exceeding $1 million to the right-wing funding apparatus started by brothers Charles and David Koch. Friess is notorious for throwing himself an almost $8 million birthday party and saying on TV that women used to avoid pregnancy by putting a Bayer aspirin “between their knees.”

Other past presidents include Tim LaHaye, one of CNP’s original founders; Edwin Meese, a right-wing California lawyer who rose to become the nation’s attorney general under President Ronald Reagan; and Pat Robertson, the far-right Christian activist who started the Christian Coalition and similar groups and who pushed theories of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy in one of his books.

A Who’s Who of the Right

The CNP directory is a remarkable roster of significant figures on the political and religious right. In addition to listing their names and affiliations with various institutions, it also notes the issues that interest each of them. Although those issues vary, the favorites given include “Homosexual Issues” and “Radical Islam.”

The directory includes officials from 14 different conservative media outlets, including the opinion editor for The Washington Times; the publisher of the Daily Caller website; the editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com; and Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker, which published a fawning profile of Jared Taylor, a leading white nationalist intellectual. It also includes major donors to conservative causes, among them Michael Grebe, CEO of the far-right Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and Hugh Maclellan, president of the Maclellan Foundation.

Intellectuals on the list include Edwin J. Feulner of the Heritage Foundation and upper-level officials from 16 mostly conservative universities and colleges. And the large number of business leaders include Nashville’s Lea Beaman, the owner of several car dealerships, James R. Leininger, founder of Kinetic Concepts Inc.; Gary Loveless of Square Mile Energy, and many others from the private sector.

The directory also contains a list of young conservative leaders who comprise the CNP’s William F. Buckley Jr. Council. Among them are Daniel Suhr, chief of staff to Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch; Nicolas L. Wenker, a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee; Garrett Gibson, a Texas Supreme Court clerk; and William J. Rivers, a press assistant to U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Another one is Josh Duggar, the infamous member of the Duggar family that was the focus of TLC’s reality show, “19 Kids and Counting.” In 2015, Duggar was enmeshed in an enormous scandal when his youthful molesting of five girls, four of them his sisters, and his later membership in the Ashley Madison hookup site became public.

And then there is Michael Centanni, a CNP member and the COO of a direct mail company that raised money for conservative candidates. Centanni pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography — more than 3,000 images and 267 videos — in October 2014. He was sentenced last year to 46 months in federal prison.

But, again, the directory is most noteworthy for its hardliners.

One of them is Austin Ruse, head of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and a man who has lobbied against reproductive rights, abortion and LGBT people at the UN and abroad for years. He once reportedly said that a Catholic priest “offered me guaranteed absolution if I just took [Hillary Clinton] out — and not on a date.” Ruse was fired from the far-right American Family Association’s radio operation for saying liberal professors should be “taken out and shot.”

Another is Tim Wildmon, leader of the American Family Association, which is also an intensely anti-LGBT group.One of the organization’s officials has notoriously complained that welfare rewards black people who “rut like rabbits” and asserted falsely that “homosexuality gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” (The group repudiated those comments last year in letters to the SPLC, which at the time was publicly criticizing the group for its role in paying for several dozen members of the Republican National Committee to visit Israel.) Wildmon himself has denounced homosexuality and described Islam as a “religion of war, violence, intolerance and physical persecution.”

Philip Zodhiates is another CNP member. In 2014, Zodhiates was accused in New York of helping a woman named Lisa Miller, a self-described former lesbian who fled the country with her daughter during a custody dispute with her former partner. Charged with conspiracy and international kidnapping, Zodhiates is set to go to trial in September 2016 and could face up to five years in prison. For years, Zodhiates’ direct mail company, Response Unlimited, sold lists of subscribers to America’s leading anti-Semitic tabloid, The Spotlight, and its successor publication, American Free Press, although neither is now listed at the Response website.

The radicalism of many members of the CNP is nothing new. That becomes obvious from a perusal of the 2014 directory’s “In Memoriam” section.

One of the people listed there is Madeleine Cosman, a longtime immigrant-basher who told a 2005 nativist conference that “most” Latino immigrant men “molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns.” Cosman, a medieval cookbook author with no expertise in medicine or immigration, also was the source of the storied, and entirely false, claim by then-CNN anchor Lou Dobbs that immigrants had brought a wave of leprosy to the United States.

Another is Howard Phillips, founder in 1992 of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, whose goal was to implement biblical law. Phillips was known for his opposition to the Voting Rights Act, homosexuality, pornography, immigrants and abortion.

W. Cleon Skousen,who is also on that list, was a longtime speaker for the John Birch Society and defender of the Mormon Church’s then-policy of excluding black people from its priesthood. Skousen was obsessed with alleged communist subversion and wrote a book, The Naked Capitalist, that remains a major source of conspiracy theories for people including television personality Glenn Beck.

Others on the list include Larry McDonald, a congressman and the second president of the John Birch Society; J. Evetts Haley, who wanted to use the Texas Rangers to enforce school segregation after the Supreme Court outlawed it; and Clarence Arch Decker, a one-time Colorado state senator whose Summit Ministries once published a book suggesting that gay people might have to be interned.

The Danger of the CNP

The CNP has every legal right to hold its meetings in private and to try to keep its membership secret. And it does publish many of the speeches its members hear, including most of the talks given by the GOP presidential candidates last fall (the exception was Trump’s talk). The speeches tend to center on expected topics for such conservatives, from opposition to same-sex marriage to cutting taxes.

But it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.

And the people mixing with or giving speeches to these extremists are key leaders in American society. Those speaking in recent years to the CNP have included President George W. Bush; Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney; and Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The speakers at CNP’s candidate forum last October included Trump, Ben Carson, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.

At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.

CNP's 2014 Membership Directory:

CNP: The Hardliners

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a body that mixes large numbers of ostensibly mainstream conservatives with far-right and extremist ideologues, mostly from the far fringes of the religious right. What follows is a list of 18 of the hardest-line CNP members and links to information about them and their groups, when available, published in the past by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Groups designated by the SPLC as hate groups are marked with an asterisk (*).

Tony Perkins

*Family Research Council

Washington, D.C.

CNP Vice President

Kenneth Blackwell

*Family Research Council

Washington, D.C.

CNP Executive Committee

Austin Ruse

*Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute

Washington, D.C., and New York, N.Y.

CNP member

Mathew “Mat” Staver

*Liberty Counsel

Orlando, Fla.

CNP Board of Governors

Tim Wildmon

*American Family Association

Tupelo, Miss.

CNP member

Brad Dacus

*Pacific Justice Institute

Sacramento, Calif.

CNP member

Alan Sears

Alliance Defending Freedom

Scottsdale, Ariz.

CNP Board of Governors

Benjamin Bull

Alliance Defending Freedom

Scottsdale, Ariz.

CNP member

Brian Brown

National Organization for Marriage

Washington, D.C.

CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle

Phyllis Schlafly

Eagle Forum

Alton, Ill.

CNP Executive Committee, CNP Action Inc.

Jerome Corsi

WorldNetDaily

Washington, D.C.

CNP Board of Governors

Michael Peroutka

Institute of the Constitution

Pasadena, Md.

CNP Board of Governors

Tim Macy

Gun Owners of America

Springfield, Va.

CNP Board of Governors

Bishop Harry Jackson Jr.

Hope Christian Church

Beltsville, Md.

CNP member

Gary Bauer

American Values

Merrifield, Va.

CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle

Troy Newman

Operation Rescue

Wichita, Kan.

CNP member

David Noebel (retired)

Summit Ministries

Manitou Springs, Colo.

CNP member

Frank Gaffney

*Center for Security Policy

Washington, D.C.

CNP member

CNP Rules and Regulations

In order to allow “open, uninhibited remarks” from its speakers, CNP members must adhere to strict rules regarding their thrice-yearly meetings. A memorandum from former executive director and 2014 Executive Committee member Morton C. Blackwell lists the rules.

Special guests may attend only with advance unanimous approval of the Executive Committee.

The solicitation of funds on a one-to-one basis is prohibited at meetings.

Council meetings are closed to the media and the general public. The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.

Speakers' remarks at Council meetings are off the record and not for circulation later, except with special permission.

Members and guests are requested to keep in their personal possession their registration packets and other materials distributed at the meeting.

Our membership list is strictly confidential and should not be shared outside the Council.

Fundraising from the list is also prohibited.

Members are asked to avoid organizing and attending formal meetings of other groups or organizations in the same city before, during or immediately after a Council meeting.

Reprinted with permission from the Political Research Associates website, publiceye.org.

Media & the CNP

What follows is a list of leading officials of right-wing or conservative media organizations who are also members of the Council for National Policy (CNP). The list includes regular members, but also one executive officer of the CNP and members of the group’s Executive Committee, its Board of Governors and its Gold Circle, as listed in parentheses below.

American Conservative

John Basil Utley, Publisher

American Thinker

Thomas Lifson, Editor and Publisher

Bott Radio Network

Richard P. Bott Sr., Founder and Chairman (CNP Board of Governors)

Rich P. Bott, President and CEO (CNP Board of Governors, Executive Committee, Gold Circle)

CNSNews.com/Media Research Center

Terry P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief

The Daily Caller

Neil S. Patel, Co-Founder and Publisher

Forbes

Steve Forbes,Chairman and Editor-in-Chief (CNP Board of Governors)

National Religious Broadcasters

Jerry Johnson, President and CEO

NewsMax Media, Inc.

Christopher Ruddy, Founder, CEO and President (CNP Board of Governors)

PatriotPost.us

Mark Alexander, Executive Editor and Publisher

Salem Media Group

Edward G. Atsinger, III, CEO (CNP Board of Governors)

Stewart Epperson, Chairman of the Board (CNP President)

Truth Broadcasting

Stu Epperson, Jr., President

The Washington Times

David Keene, Opinion Editor

The Western Center for Journalism

Floyd G. Brown, President

World Magazine

Warren C. Smith, Associate Publisher

WorldNetDaily

Joseph F. Farah, Founder, CEO and Editor (CNP Board of Governors, Gold Circle)

Jerome R. Corsi, Senior Staff Member (CNP Board of Governors)

Higher Education & the CNP

The following list of 20 college and university officials at 16 schools who are also members of the Council for National Policy (CNP) gives a sense of how far the group has reached into conservative academia, particularly religious institutions. Two of those listed are also members of the CNP’s Board of Governors.

Arizona Christian University

President Len Munsil

Belmont Abbey College

President William Thierfelder

Capitol University Law School

Professor of Law Bradley A. Smith (CNP Board of Governors)

Colorado Christian University

Centennial Institute Director John K. Andrews

Ecclesia College

President Oren Paris

Hillsdale College

President Larry P. Arnn

Vice President for External Affairs Douglas A. Jeffrey

Houston Baptist University

President Robert B. Sloan (CNP Board of Governors)

Vice President for Advancement Charles Bacarisse

Institute of World Politics

Founder and President John Lenczowski

Liberty University

Dean HelmsSchool of Government Shawn D. Akers

Associate Dean for Internal Affairs, School of Law, Joseph M. Wiegand

Louisiana College

President Joe Aguillard

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

President Everett G. Piper

Foundation Executive Director David Preston

Patrick Henry College

Chancellor & Founder Michael P. Farris

Pepperdine University

Vice Chancellor Michael Y. Warder

Southern Evangelical Seminary

President Richard Land

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

President Paige Patterson

Truett-McConnell College

President Emir Caner

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bak, hub? ginni tony perkins vp devos koch bak 1019

trump: conway, fara wnd, bannon

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wapo 3 guys bob mcewan demurs

‘When someone says, “I know a guy” …’

Allied Special Operations Group, as the firm was first named, was initially envisioned as a one-stop shop for government and corporate clients seeking cybersecurity, physical protection and sophisticated open-source intelligence services, Ramsland and former employees told The Post.

The company was formed in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kraft was the company’s chief executive, and it was based out of his house in a subdivision north of Fort Worth. Kraft declined to comment for this report.

An early promotional video described ASOG as “a group of highly trained professionals who have seen it all,” and it stressed the intelligence backgrounds of some team members. “When someone says, ‘I know a guy,’ he’s talking about ASOG,” said the narrator, who said that ASOG personnel had taken part in the types of missions “that many of us only see in the movies.”

Months after Kraft filed papers to establish the company, he was joined by a trio of other men, state records show.

Alvan “Locke” Neely, a retired Secret Service agent who first served in the Ford administration, became ASOG’s chief operations officer.

J. Keet Lewis was named ASOG’s vice president of strategy. Lewis served on the executive committee of theCouncil for National Policy (CNP), a Washington-based organization that for decades has been a networking hub for powerful conservative activists and donors.

According to his biography in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Lewis consulted on international energy projects and had helped develop the Skimmer Basket Buddy, a patented maintenance tool for swimming pools. He did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Ramsland, who was also then a member of the CNP, joined as ASOG’s chief financial officer. The son and grandson of West Texas oilmen lived with his wife in the Preston Hollow section of Dallas, home to former president George W. Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban....

---

https://**documented.**net/investigations

INVESTIGATIONS

A selection of current Documented investigations along with key documents and recordings from those investigations.

CNP 87 copy

INVESTIGATION SERIES

The Council for National Policy Forty Year Project to Radically Transform the Country

INVESTIGATION

Recordings and Materials From Council for National Policy Meetings

Dozens of recordings and documents obtained by Documented reveal what happens behind closed doors at CNP meetings

https://documented.net/investigations/council-for-national-policy-recordings

NOVEMBER 10 2021

STORY

Documented Research on the Council for National Policy Featured in Major Washington Post Investigation

The Post investigation is based on dozens of internal CNP videos, documents and other materials obtained by Documented

OCTOBER 25 2021|BY NICK SURGEY

DOCUMENT

Speech given by Ed Feulner at CNP 40th anniversary event

A copy of a speech given by Ed Fuelner on the origin and history of CNP, during CNP's 40th anniversary event CNP in Naples, FL, on May 21 2021. Fuelner was a CNP founder and is the former head of the Heritage Foundation.

PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 25 2021

DOCUMENT

CNP April 2020 Membership Directory

April 2020 membership directory from the secretive Council for National Policy--naming hundreds of CNP members, which the organization does not make public.

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an me 921

Members of the Republican Party have been linked the Council for National Policy (CNP) which gives them the opportunity to network with far right extremists who support some of the party's more controversial campaigns, a newly leaked document shows.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which surveils far right extremist groups, recently shed light on CNP describing the organization as "'a shadowy and intensely secretive group [which] has operated behind the scenes' in its efforts to 'build the conservative movement.'"

In fact, the group is so adamant about nondisclosure, the publication reports that "its members are instructed not to reveal their affiliation or even name the group."

However, according to The Guardian, the leaked document which dates back to September 2020 indicates that CNP "put influential Trump administration figures alongside leaders of organizations that have been categorized as hate groups."

The publication reports that the leaked document also contains contact information for most members of the group. Many members of the group are part of organizations deemed hate groups by the SPLC.

Per The Guardian:

"Leaders of organizations listed as anti-Muslim hate groups, including:

"Founders or leaders of groups listed anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, such as:

While the group typically aims to stay under the radar, back in 2020 the Washington Post obtained footage of CNP executive committee chairman Bill Walton spoke about the 2020 presidential election saying, “This is a spiritual battle we are in. This is good versus evil."

In wake if the latest findings, anti-extremism advocates have expressed concern about the group's innerworkings and its affiliation with influential political figures.

Heidi Beirich, an affiliate of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, released an emailed statement stating that “this new CNP list makes clear that the group still serves as a key venue where mainstream conservatives and extremists mix."

She added that CNP “clearly remains a critical nexus for mainstreaming extremism from the far right into conservative circle."

...

Trump spoke for about one hour at CNP's 2020 annual meeting.[15] CNP's 2014 membership directory listed Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, both of whom served as Trump's counselors, as members of the organization.[16]

Mike Pence Membership and Evangelical Turnout Strategy Using Scare Tactics

Center for National Policy's campaigns use scare tactics on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights to politically engage conservative Christians. A 2019 piece by Shadow Network author Anne Nelson described Vice President Mike Pence's membership in CNP as well as the group's strategy to identify and turnout "some 17 million politically unengaged evangelicals, many concentrated in swing states" by telling them falsehoods such as "Democrats will 'execute babies on the day of their birth'" and that "schoolchildren face a mortal danger of sexual assault by transgender people using public restrooms."[17]

CNP Secret Meeting to Discuss Strategy After Kavanaugh's Supreme Court Confirmation

CNP members met for a three-day retreat during Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation process.As described by The Intercept, "The agenda for the event featured a veritable who’s who of Christian conservatives, including Ginni Thomas, the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas; U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley; former Sen. Jim DeMint,the former president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; pollster Frank Luntz; and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio..." Other attendees includedT. Cullen Davis, Herman Cain, Bob McEwen, representatives from Family Research Council, and presenters from Faith and Freedom Coalition.[18]

SPLC Exposed CNP's 2014 Member List and Group's Mix of Mainstream and Extremist Conservatives

In 2016, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) obtained a copy of CNP's 2014 membership directory.[9] SPLC described the group's membership, saying: "The 2014 CNP members are paragons of the conservative establishment. There are business titans, Christian college presidents, owners and editors of right-wing media outlets, GOP mega-donors, government staffers and leading members of conservative think tanks. There are officials of organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society. There are politicians and political appointees, anti-abortion activists and also some who are less known publicly as conservatives, like Linda L. Bean, who owns L.L. Bean Inc., an outdoorsy clothing company.

But what is most remarkable about the directory is that it reveals how the CNP has become a key meeting place where ostensibly mainstream conservatives interact with individuals who are, by any reasonable definition, genuinely extremist."[9]

Rigid Secrecy Rules Regarding Guests and Communication with the Media

CNP maintains strict secrecy rules for its members, who "are told not to discuss the group, reveal the topics discussed in the closed-door meetings, or even say whether or not they are members of the organization."[19] A 2014 memorandum listed CNP's full set of rules:[9]

History and Founding

As reported by ABC News, "CNP was conceived in 1981 by at least five fathers, including the Rev. Tim LaHaye, an evangelical preacher who was then the head of the Moral Majority. (LaHaye is the co-author of the popular Left Behind series that predicts and subsequently depicts the Apocalypse). Nelson Baker Hunt, billionaire son of billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt (connected to both the John Birch Society and to Ronald Reagan's political network), businessman and one-time murder suspect T. Cullen Davis, and wealthy John Bircher William Cies provided the seed money."[20] The report also notes how "Christian activist Paul Weyrich took responsibility for bringing together the best minds of conservatism, and his imprint on the group's mission is unmistakable: It provided a forum for religiously engaged conservative Christians to influence the geography of American political power."[20]

A 2020 New Republic book review of Anne Nelson's Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right retells the story of CNP's founding: "In 1981, Weyrich, Viguerie, LaHaye, Republican functionary Morton Blackwell, anti-feminist lawyer Phyllis Schlafly, oil scion Nelson Bunker Hunt, beer magnate Joseph Coors, and some 50 other conservatives began meeting every Wednesday morning in Viguerie’s handsome Virginia home. It was there that they founded the Council for National Policy. The CNP was deliberately modeled after the Council on Foreign Relations, a prestigious nonprofit think tank with thousands of prominent members and deep connections to America’s foreign policy elite. Similarly, the CNP focused early on international affairs, presenting Oliver North with a special award “for national defense” and inviting far-right Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson to give a talk. It also sought tax-exempt status, citing the group’s similarity to the CFR. And though membership in the CNP was likewise highly exclusive and by invitation only, Nelson wryly notes that its 1982 executive committee included Richard Shoff, 'former state secretary of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan.'"[3]

CNP Action, Inc.

According to CNP's website, "CNP Action, Inc. is the 501(c)(4) sister organization of the Council for National Policy. Founded in 1987, CNP Action, Inc. serves as an advocate for conservative principles such as limited government, free economic enterprise, traditional values and a strong national defense. It promotes issues or specific pieces of legislation through regular Action Sessions and publications."[21] Beginning in April 2020, this organization began involved with strategies to reopen U.S. states despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.[22][23]

CNP Action Organized "Pro-Trump" Doctors To Legitimate Reopening Efforts

Associated Press reported on a May 2020 conference call between CNP Action and a senior staffer for Trump's reelection campaign, originally obtained by Center for Media and Democracy. In the leaked meeting, these operatives discussed "recruiting 'extremely pro-Trump' doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible" despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.[22] When asked about these efforts by AP, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh asserted he took no issue with contradicting the government's infectious disease experts. Murtaugh explained, "Our job at the campaign is to reflect President Trump’s point of view... We are his campaign. There is no difference between us and him."[22]

CNP Action Helped Coordinate COVID-19 Lockdown Protests

In April 2020, CNP Action "hosted weekly conference calls to coordinate coronavirus response tactics", working together with organizations including FreedomWorks, Open the States, ReOpen PA, The Save Our Country Task Force, and Tea Party Patriots.[23] The stated goal of Tea Party Patriots was to "share the stories of people who have been affected by the lockdowns, to show that we must be concerned with both sides of this crisis."[23]

CNP also shared information through email about attending in-person events, including an Eagle Forum-organized car protest at the Alabama Capitol Building and a lockdown protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol.[23]

Ties to the Bradley Foundation

Through 2018 Council for National Policy received $485,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. As of September 2020, Bradley president and CEO Richard Graber was a CNP Board of Governors member.[8][24]

Bradley Files

In 2017, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of SourceWatch, launched a series of articles on the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, exposing the inner-workings of one of America's largest right-wing foundations. 56,000 previously undisclosed documents laid bare the Bradley Foundation's highly politicized agenda. CMD detailed Bradley's efforts to map and measure right wing infrastructure nationwide, including by dismantling and defunding unions to impact state elections; bankrolling discredited spin doctor Richard Berman and his many front groups; and more.

Find the series here at ExposedbyCMD.org.

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

As of 2020, Lisa Nelson, the CEO of ALEC, was a CNP member.[8]

About ALEC
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our ExposedbyCMD.org site.

Membership

As of September 2020:[8]

Gold Circle Members

Former Gold Circle Members

Board of Governors Members

As of September 2020:

Former Governors

Members

As of September 2020:

Edward Rutledge Fellowship Members

As of October 2018:[24]

William F Buckley Jr. Council Members

As of October 2018:[24]

Notable Members Known from Other Sources

Former Members

Known CNP Guest Speakers

Meetings

2020

August

CNP met August 19-21 at the Ritz Carlton in Arlington, Virginia. A copy of the agenda is available here.

CNP published four speeches from the event on its website, including:[30]

February

CNP published one discussion and two speeches from its February event on its website, including:[31]

Funding

Council for National Policy is not required to disclose its donors, but some of its funding sources are known through the IRS filings of other organizations. CNP's known funders include:

Joseph Coors has contributed start-up funding for several conservative organizations, including CNP, since 1973.[32]

Core Financials

...

Not walmart, dad fla real estate

"Bill Walton is a Founding Managing Member of Rockpoint and is responsible for the overall operations and management of Rockpoint, as well as overseeing the origination, structuring and asset management of all of Rockpoint’s investment activities. Mr. Walton maintains offices in Jacksonville and Boston. In addition to his responsibilities at Rockpoint, Mr. Walton is a co-founder and Managing Member of Westbrook Real Estate Partners, L.L.C. (“WREP”). Prior to co-founding WREP in 1994, Mr. Walton was a Managing Director in the real estate group of Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 1979. Mr. Walton is involved with several real estate industry organizations and has served as a Director or Trustee on the Boards of several public companies, as well as private and non-profit organizations, including Princeton University and Princeton University Investment Company. Mr. Walton received an A.B. in Economics from Princeton University in 1974 and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1979." [1]

"Prior to co-founding the firm in 1994, he served as a Managing Director at the Real Estate group at Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 1979. Mr. Walton serves as a Director of Florida Rock Industries Inc., since 2003. He is a Director of Crow Family Holdings. He served as a Director of The St. Joe Co." [1]

As Allied Small Business Investment "moved into the big time, so did Walton, who became a pillar of the local establishment. He has served as president of the National Symphony, treasurer of Wolf Trap, a trustee of the National Gallery of Art, a member of the Federal City Council, and a director of the American Enterprise Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. His private clubs include Metropolitan, Burning Tree and Chevy Chase.He traveled the country in Allied's corporate jet and by 2007 was earning just under $11 million in cash and stock, and he had houses in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood and in Little Washington -- Washington, Va. The first signs of trouble for Walton and Allied came in 2002, when hedge fund manager David Einhorn took a large short position in Allied stock and went public with accusations that the company was overvaluing its investment portfolio and covering up a problem with fraudulent lending at a small-business lending unit. " [2]

His father is William H. Walton, Jr.

omg

no lnx

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 9, 2021 Issue

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

By Jane Mayer

August 2, 2021

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.

Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Societyfounding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.

Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell,who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.

In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”

Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”

On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”

In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”

Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”

Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in thestate had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.

A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act,eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values.By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.

The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis,who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.

Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.

Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based groupthat, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.

Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy,a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor.In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district.The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.

Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”

Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.

A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”

Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”

“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.

By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless.

But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network—a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.

While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”

Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.

For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”

Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?

my sum

cnpshadownet

Dramatis Personae ix

Prologue xiii

newpapers die--> fklin ctr and radio: salem, Am Family Radio and BOTT RADIO NETWORK

mostly work on STATE LEVEL but also farm team xvi

origin on conserv resuryence of 70-80's 180 liberalization of So Baptist Convention, purge libs replicate in NRA

DATA PLUS GRASSROOTS

PLUS CHURCHES/EVANG; "family" values = anti gay and abort?

OIL Tx OK LA anti green, soc safe net model replic by DJT

koch network

1 In the Beginning: Texas 1

theocracy, segregation; So Baptist slit over slavery, 1845 states rights; 1961 Bible litearl anothr split? Presasler humble oil --> exxon; fundamentalist takeover "going for jugular" p7 7 mtsn Dominionism

PAUL WEYRICH P 10, FOUNER hERITAGE, RSC, LUNCH CLUB, COFDR ALEC

P11 DEMS STARE INNOC XGE DECADES LATER

richard vigurie

xian rally JAMES ROBISON, TED CRUZ DAD RAFAEL

CARTER had support but PO's w/ ERA, abortion IRS audit of orgs 1934 CONG TAKE IRS STATUS FROM ORGS DOING PROPAHGANDA[DEFEND NEW DEAL?];

2 The Birth of the CNP: Washington 20

pressler calvinist; dem civil rights ~ Bob jobes SR son of confed soldier, segrgation; attacked graham for pal of MLK p23

MORTON BLACKWELL

CPAC DIRECT MAIL; 26

PHYLIS SCHLAFLY

SINGLAUB rr CONTRAS $ CNP BD GOVS  BLOWTORCH BOB D'AUBISSON

CFR IRS COVER AT TT 33

3 Lords of the Air: The CNP's Media Empire 35

RR WIN VIG WANTS 4.5 MIL IN DB; DIRECT MAIL DEMO END RUN AROUND NEWS MEDIA 36

SALEM 38 SELLS TIME TO REVS WHO RAISE $ FCC ALLOWS SALE

DOBSON FRC PAR ROBERTSON SON OF SEN VA) CBN INSINUATED CAND ENDORSEMENT; SKIRT JOHNSOM AMENDMENT

FRC GARY BAUER

FALWELL

CNN --> END OF FQAIR DOCT 45

4 The News Hole in the Heart of America 49

about jrnl

70% inhert tax forced some family papers? to sell tocorps 52  media mwergers; yng ppl not into news; newmark craigslist 53

telecomm act 1996 written by lobbyists, boost by newt signed by clinton 56 xian radio #3 corps dump radio;

1994 diet suppl act orin hatxch famuily in biz

MIKE PENCE

TONY PERKINS FRC --> CNP PR FRONT 61

5 Money People 62

ECO DISDIATERS EPA REGS VIGURES SEZ TEDDT R TRAITOR B/C OF PARKS 64  BIG OIL, CONFED ROOTS 65  CNP HEARTLAND

FOSTER FRIESS 66

CULLEN DAVIS MURDER 67

HUNT BROS SIMVEE FAIL

RICHARD DEVOS 68 DUTCH REFORM REFUGEES?  EDGAR PRINCE LIGHTEN VANITY MIRROR; AMWAY RECRUIITS REVS?  DOBSON FOCUS FAMILY;

6 Fishers of Men: Electoral Stratagems 77

NRA MCQUEEN ACKERMAN

LEANERSHIP INST CNP

7 Ideology 101: The CNP's Campus Partners 100

3SPHASE DEV MOTOVATE ELITE 2 DEV INST TO AFFECT MASSES 3 CHANGE AM CULTURE uses media but also colleges alt frats,

HILLSDALE COLLEGE MICH DEVOS MASSIVE ENDOW; IMPROMIS MAG BIG CIRC 3.9 MIL; NO FED $ SO NO SOCIAL JUSTUICE; BIG IN DJT ADMIN; KIRBY CTR RADIO STATION HUGH HEWITT 105 // DAILY CALLER R]TUCKER; FREE ONLINE COURSES;

FALWELL LIBERTY u 107 SCAM ONLINE TARGET VETS

KIRK TPUSA 111 IN CNP NETWORK; JANE MAYER GET CONTROL OF STUDENT GOV'T BDS HATE SP; FIX NAZI CANDACE PROBLEM BY RABBI BEN PACKER MEIR KAHANE 113; 501C3 BUT BRUCE RAUNER

8 Koch, DeVos, Soros: Donors, Politics, and Pastors 118

KOCHS SPOOKED BY NEAR GORE WIN --> DONOR/ SUMMITS, GO FOR STARTE LEVEL;

soros democ alliance mostly int';l cf skocpol study 133

9 The Obama Challenge 137

So Bap peek 2006 16 mil steep drop;

FEDSOC MEYWER FDR DAD EX RED 180 142 DEVIS $

JAY SEKULOW 143

NRATV

TEA PARTY 154JENNT BETH MARTIN 450k$

FKLIN CTR $ DOWN 2015

10 Data Wars 162

DEMS bo HAD EARLY LEAD?  NRA TRIGGER THE VOTE...

11 The Art of the Deal: New York, June 21, 2016 191

TRUMP

FOX TODD STARNES CNP MEMBER  BEN CARSO  FRABKLIN GRAHAM; HUCKABEE ANNOITS? 199 EVANG ADVIS BD

12 "The Miracle" 207

BLAIR BREXIT, KOCHS WOOED; RALPH REED; JAY SEK USSR INVEST? 224

13 Midterms 229

WATCHMEN ON THE WALL US EMB TO JERU END TIMES

14 "Democracy in America" 248

pack cts; clare McC hit?

okla presage neolib trump USA? [// Brownback?]

Koch compre pgm: 4 inst: educ, biz, community org, polocy 260

Epilogue 264

anne nelson bloomsbury 2019

Anne Nelson has received a Livingston Award for her journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research, and a Bellagio Fellowship for her research on the social impact of digital media. A graduate of Yale University, she began her career as a journalist in the U.S and abroad. She won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing on the conflict in Central America, which she covered for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the BBC. She has taught at Columbia University for over two decades, first at the School of Journalism and then at the School of International and Public Affairs. Her previous books include Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. A native of Oklahoma, she lives in New York City.

interview: https://billmoyers.com/story/new-podcast-the-shadow-network/

no lnx

The Shadow Network

BY BILLMOYERS.COM TEAM | OCTOBER 21, 2020

Moyers on Democracy · Bill Moyers talks with Anne Nelson about “The Shadow Network”

“

ANNOUNCER: 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.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

ANNE NELSON: My pleasure.

BILL 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 Coney Barrett 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 that one 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 the power 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 to Leonard 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 nominations Trump 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 lead on 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 that John 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 these past 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.

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 the electoral college carries 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 Analytica with several hundred million voters, with some 2,000 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 these beacons 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 guides to 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.

booktv

https://www.c-span.org/video/?464899-8/shadow-network

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774133071/shadow-network-offers-a-lesson-on-the-american-rights-mastery-of-politics

review:

...Nelson traces the group from its founding in 1981 "by a small group of archconservatives who realized that the tides of history had turned against them" — specifically, activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie. (Other founding members included Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behindauthor Tim LaHaye.) The CNP's structure, Nelson writes, was similar to a group called the Council on Foreign Relations (of which Nelson herself is a member) — like that group, the CNP organized as a tax-exempt educational institution, although it was "designed to serve as the engine for a radical political agenda."

The CNP soon realized it could reach prospective voters through the media that many of its members owned. That included the radio broadcasting company Salem Media Group, co-founded by CNP members Stuart W. Epperson and Edward G. Atsinger; and would later include online publications like the Daily Caller. The programming of these various outlets, Nelson writes, "is not uniform, but it harmonizes."

Driving the success of the CNP was, Nelson claims, anxiety brought about by demographic changes. In the past century, more Americans have moved to cities, and fewer citizens are white and Protestant. "The mores of the new America created an unbearable tension," Nelson writes. "These demographic trends — and the anxiety they provoked — contributed to the forces that brought Trump to power."

But you can't convert anxiety into votes without cash, and Nelson does an excellent job following the money. She profiles some of the group's funders, both past and present, including businessman Foster Friess and controversial Texas oil heir T. Cullen Davis. Perhaps most prominent among the donors, though, are two families: the DeVos clan ("CNP royalty") and the Koch brothers, who donated widely to groups headed by CNP members.

Nelson follows the CNP through the 2016 election, in which most of its members, initially horrified by Trump, supported Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But their distaste for Trump was no match for their fear and hatred of Hillary Clinton. "[T]he Republicans fell into line as soon as Trump's nomination was confirmed, and the CNP media complex responded to a central command," Nelson writes.

Shadow Networkis bound to appeal to those whose interest in politics run deep, but it's not so inside baseball that lay readers will be stuck in the weeds. Nelson doesn't assume that her readers will be intimate with the ins and outs of how money influences politics, but she also never condescends to her audience — she does an admirable job providing context for the CNP and groups like it, and introducing readers to some of the lesser-known names with ties to the organization.

Nelson is not a neutral political observer, nor does she claim to be, which means Shadow Networkwill appeal much more to progressive and moderate readers than to conservative ones. She doesn't hide her animus for what she calls the "shrewd, remarkable and sometimes unscrupulous characters" who have made their mark on the American right, but she never descends into conspiracy theorizing — she makes her case soberly and with a historian's scrupulousness.

Shadow Networkis a fascinating book, and readers curious about how the American right gets its message out will find much to admire in it. It also serves as a grim warning for progressives who might already be counting their chickens before the 2020 election: "The CNP and its partners have spent over four decades studying their audience and mastering the written and unwritten rules of American politics," Nelson writes. "Its moralists have little regard for the rights of minorities; its financiers lack concern for social welfare; and its strategists have no respect for majority rule. If it is fully realized, their combination of theocracy and plutocracy could result in a dystopia for those who fall outside their circle."

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/how-ginni-thomas-and-the-shadowy-council-of-national-policy-advanced-a-disinformation-campaign/

before Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas took to Facebook in the early morning hours that Wednesday; there she urged people to tune into the so-called Stop the Steal rally held on the grounds of the White House. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” sheposted, adding minutes later, “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.”

Though her affinity for caps-lock commentary may suggest otherwise, Ginni Thomas is an influential right-wing activist respected in conservative politics. The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she has made her own mark on the Republican Party with lofty positions at Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, The Daily Caller, and the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization whose members include some of the most powerful conservatives and right-wing players in the country.

Respected though she may be in conservative circles, Ginni Thomas’ connection to extremists is nothing new. In 2010, she led Liberty Central, a think tank she founded to appeal to Tea Party supporters andto serve as the connective tissue between “Tea Party groups and the new citizen activists,” as she claimed in a2010 interview. That group’s sponsors included the Gun Owners of America—a radical alternative to the NRA—and its gun-rights extremist leader**Larry Pratt**, who addressed white supremacists at a 1992 gathering in Colorado and appeared to call for war against the U.S. government in 2010. The far-right Catholic groupTradition, Family and Property, known for being virulently anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, and anti-democratic, was also linked to Ginni Thomas’ think tank from its inception. 

Ginni Thomas’ zeal for the Stop the Steal campaign and its followers, a mob of whom would later storm the Capitol in an act of domestic terrorism, is notable in and of itself—her husband sits on the highest court, after all—but it’s also disconcerting for another reason: She is the latest in a string of Council for National Policy members—and an authoritative voice at that—who has supported the Stop the Steal movement.'[twt]

since the inception of this latest incarnation of the Stop the Steal campaign on Nov. 4 by lead organizer Ali Alexander, who himself was a member as recently as 2017, according to membership rollsobtained by the watchdog group Documented, it has received support from CNP members. In fact, the tacit support of key CNP members for challenging the 2020 presidential election results may have been theimpetus for Alexander’s decision to begin the campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election by peddling disinformation. 

Formed during the Reagan administration, CNP holds closed-door meetings and instructs members to not discuss the council’s work or its membership, though, over the years, membership rolls have been leaked to the press. Those rolls have shown the organization to be home to a couple hundred marquee names in the conservative movement, Christian right, and right-wing fringe: Current members include Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and Tony Perkins of the religious-right Family Research Council; former members include Trump’s former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. 

The CNP has a close relationship with the Trump White House—so much so, that at the superspreader Rose Garden event to celebrate the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “there were more Council for National Policy members present there than there were members of the White House staff and members of Congress combined,” said Anne Nelson, author of the “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” a book about the CNP. And on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump gave a big speech to the Council for National Policy, calling it as his “flagship address,” a rare public event for the council, Nelson said.

Nelson describes the CNP’s main role as providing “coordination, rather than direction” to its members, which include executives of such right-wing outlets the Salem Media Group and The Daily Caller.Ginni Thomas, Nelson points out, is on the board of governors of CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the secretive organization. In May 2019, Thomas and Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell provided an update on the Conservative Action Project,CNP’s 501(c)(4) arm that holds weekly meetings, and laid out their strategy for the coming year with aslide presentation to CNP members, which included messaging about building a robust infrastructure on the right and protecting Trump. 

In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 mayhem, and on the day itself, the connection between CNP and Stop the Steal—and the campaign’s influence on the White House—became more apparent. 

On Dec. 30, Right Wing Watch posted areportabout alettersent by the Conservative Action Project to Senate Republicans urging them to “contest the electoral votes” from “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona”—the battleground states Biden won. That letter may have not mentioned Stop the Steal by name, but it asked senators to do exactly what Stop the Steal was demanding of Republican members of Congress: to reject electoral votes in favor of Biden. 

Those signees included Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer (who was on theinfamous phone call when Trump asked that Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes”); Tom Fitton, an CNP executive committee member whose Judicial Watch group constantly spouts voter fraud conspiracy theories; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and columnist for The Washington Times; Tony Perkins, former CNP president and leader of the Family Research Council; Kenneth Blackwell,former Ohio secretary of state and member of CNP Action’s board of directors; and William L. Walton, current CNP president. All were revealed as CNP members in a leak of CNP’s September2020 membership directory. 

ADec. 10 letter posted on the Conservative Action Project website,reported by Alex Kotch at Exposed by CMD, asked state legislatures in battleground states to “exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump,” and that the House and Senate only recognize the electors of those states that do so. Again, this was the same demand state legislators and Congress members were hearing from Stop the Steal activists. Kotch reports that the letter links to a document that, according to metadata embedded in the file, was created by none other than Cleta Mitchell, calling for a “constitutional remedy” to reject votes for Biden. The signatories included some of the same names that appeared on the Dec. 30 letter, in addition to Ed Martin, a leading Stop the Steal organizer and CNP member whom Alexander has thanked for his“mentorship” in organizing the Stop the Steal campaign. 

Two days before the Jan. 6 rally, CNP member Charlie Kirk, who leads the youth-oriented group Turning Point USA, shared a video from Women for America First’s Kylie Jane Kremeradvertising the rally and told his followers that his organizations, TPUSA and Students for Trump, had funded more than 80 buses to attend the rally. “The historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history,” Kirk wrote. “The team at @TrumpStudents & Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president,” he said in the since deleted tweet,uncovered by Daily Dot. Kirk’s Students for Trump co-chair is Ryan Fournier, a Stop the Steal organizer who spoke at the Jan. 5 rally on the same stage where speakers advocatedrebellion.  

While a viral claim that Ginni Thomas funded the buses herself appearsto be false, Ginni Thomas has been linked to the group in the recent past, serving on Turning Point USA’s advisory council in 2019, along with fellowCNP members Foster Friess, Adam Brandon, and former Ohio congressman Bob McEwen.

On Jan. 5, speakers took to Freedom Plaza for a Stop the Steal rally designed to prime attendees for the big day. Among the speakers wasPeter Navarro, a fringe right-wing economist whospoke at the May 2019 CNP meeting. and who serves as an assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. On the stage at Freedom Plaza, Navarro peddled voter fraud conspiracy theories and urged activists to stay angry,declaring to the assembled crowd, “We will take this back.”  

On Jan. 6, Ginni Thomas told her Facebook followers to watch the event convened by groups working in concert with the Stop the Steal campaign, dubbed the “Save America Rally,” on the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting, one of the few networks to cover the gathering. The massive rally, at which Trump would incite his supporters to bring their wrath to the Capitol, was led by the groups March for Trump and the Kremers’ Women for America First. 

Amy Kremer, who was listed as a member in a2014 CNP membership directoryobtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was among the first speakers. Jenny Beth Martin, the CNP executive committee secretary whom Trump thanked in his speech to CNP this summer, was another. She brought with her Simone Gold, who is nowsought by the FBI after she appeared to be part of the crowd thatstormed the Capitol following her speech on the main stage, as seen on social media.

After the Capitol insurrection, Ginni Thomas either deactivated or deleted her Facebook account, likely unhappy thatreporters noted her enthusiasmfor a movement what would launch a riot. Josh Hawley, one of the senators who led the charge to contest electors’ votes in the Senate,charged ahead even as other lawmakers backed off in light of the violent consequences wrought by the disinformation campaign designed to delegitimize the outcome of the presidential election. “Shadow Network” author Nelsonnoted that, throughout his career, Hawley was groomed by CNP affiliates.

[pix 

Ali Alexander and other “Stop the Steal” activists at Dec. 15, 2020 press conference (Image from NTD livestream posted on Epoch Times YouTube channel.)

The Stop the Steal disinformation campaign wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without CNP support. When on Nov. 4, Ali Alexander floated the idea of rebooting the Stop the Steal campaign, which in its prior iteration was focused on the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections, baselessly claiming that the election had been stolen from Trump, he called on key CNP members including Tom Fitton, Amy Kremer, Ed Martin, and Charlie Kirk.

“Because Ali Alexander is a fairly veteran operative, he managed to get a lot of people on board very quickly,” ​said Stephanie Lamy, a French information warfare researcher with the advocacy groupDanaides. “Although he was a fairly marginal actor, he managed to have a big reach because he knew which people to rely on. And that was a lot of the CNP.”

Once he began to be successful, Lamy said, the White House seemed to have taken note.

Right Wing Watch reported about CNP members’ connection to Stop the Steal on Nov. 13—the same day Vice President Mike Pence was set to address CNP attendees in Virginia. CNP convened that meeting, Nov. 12-14, “to strategize on how to challenge the election results,”according to Exposed by CMD reporter David Armiak. At the meeting, a panel dedicated to the election results and the ensuing legal battles featured Cleta Mitchell, J. Christian Adams, a knownvoter suppressor who leads the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading proponent ofthe voter fraud myth. 

The following day, Stop the Steal organizers held the first of three major rallies in Washington, D.C., with speakers peddling disinformation and violent rhetoric on the main stage—a day that ended in violent skirmishes between Proud Boys and counterprotesters, foreshadowing the violence to come.

“Most people don’t realize that disinformation has an aim, and that aim is to have real life impact. So what we saw with Stop the Steal, it had a real-life impact as of the 6th of November [the date of one of the first Stop the Steal rallies], and it kind of culminated with these terrorist threats and a breach of the Capitol,” said Lamy, the French disinformation researcher. “And it’s still ongoing,” she continued. “The CNP hasn’t finished manipulating anger and personal grievances.”

Tags: Ali Akbar Ali AlexanderAmy Kremer Charlie Kirk Clarence Thomas Cleta Mitchell Ed Martin Ginni Thomas Hans von Spakovsky J Christian Adams Jenny Beth Martin Kellyanne Conway Ken Blackwell Kylie Jane Kremer Peter Navarro Ryan Fournier Steve Bannon Tom Fitton Tony Perkins William Walton Capitol Insurrection Disinformation Stop the Steal Council for National Policy Gun Owners of America tea party Women for America First

1220 alec watch

Until CMD obtained secret audio and blew the whistle, the far-Right Council for National Policy was working with the Trump campaign and White House on a plan to parade pro-Trump doctors on TV to paper over Trump’s incompetent handling of the pandemic and push for a fast reopening.

Additionally, documents obtained by CMD showed how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate lobby front group, played a leading role in the right-wing campaign to force a rapid reopening of the economy last summer against the advice of public health experts—with disastrous consequences. CMD even unearthed an ALEC sign-on letter praising Florida Gov. Ron Desantis for reopening Florida early—but they pulled it when Florida became the worst pandemic hot spot in the country as a result of the early reopening.

pseudo event

NOTE CORP  CNP ALEC KOCH BASTARDS USE HYDROXY IN CYNICAL? FURY?  MOVE TO RE-OPEN ECONOMY

9/20

https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/

On July 27, a dozen physicians posed in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., dressed in white lab coats with “America’s Frontline Doctors” stitched over the pocket. The group’s chief spokesperson was Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency physician from Los Angeles. They were introduced by Jenny Beth Martin, the founding CEO of Tea Party Patriots, as participants in the “White Coat Summit.” The doctors made spirited arguments for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for Covid-19 and against wearing masks and imposing lockdowns—all running counter to the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[[1]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn1)

Although the event was billed as a “press conference,” few journalists attended. A video posted by a bystander showed only a handful of attendees, most of them dressed in tourists’ shorts and T-shirts. But the event was livestreamed by Breitbart News and quickly went (so to speak) viral.

There was a rapid backlash. Much of the media attention focused onDr. Stella Immanuel, one of Gold’s cohort. Following the press conference, the Daily Beast posted a video of Immanuel, who is also a Pentecostal preacher, delivering a sermon claiming that various female ailments were caused by sexual visitations from “demons.”

Immanuel has since disappeared from the America’s Frontline Doctors online roster, but the group has continued to get traction. On August 10, Pat Robertson’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network carried an interview with Simone Gold and an endorsement of her hydroxychloroquine cure.On August 21, Alex Jones’s NewsWars carried an interview with another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Mark McDonald. McDonald—a child psychiatrist—maintained, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.”

Science has shown otherwise. Despite early hopes last spring, there is mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is a problematic—and even dangerous—treatment for Covid-19. One expert with firsthand knowledge is Nick Sawyer, an academic emergency physician in Sacramento, Calif. In July he wrote an article for Lifeline, the publication of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, describing his harrowing two weeks of service in the Covid wards of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Sawyer was part of a team of California doctors dispatched by Governor Gavin Newsome to offer emergency assistance at the epicenter of the epidemic, at the height of the New York City outbreak.

Sawyer is now dealing with the spike in cases in California, this time with the benefit of four months of additional Covid research. “The science on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 is settled—multiple high-quality studies have shown that it shows no benefit,” he notes. Far more concerning, Sawyer says, is its potential harm: “Hydroxychloroquine can cause unstable cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.” Over recent months, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and other organizations have issued warnings that the drug should be withdrawn as a Covid-19 treatment. “It’s irresponsible for America’s Frontline Doctors to continue to push this medication on the unwitting American population,” Sawyer states.

Why, then, would Gold’s band of physicians continue its campaign to pitch the treatment to the public? Simone Gold has repeatedly described her group as a “grassroots organization” acting in the service of its patients.[[2]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn2) In fact, it has been a highly orchestrated effort, months in the making, assembled by conservative Washington insiders in direct consultation with the White House, with the goal of reopening the economy in time to benefit Trump’s reelection prospects—regardless of the toll in human lives.

The first public mention of the initiative may have been a Washington Post story on April 13, as the virus raged across New York City and Covid-19 deaths passed the 20,000 mark.[[3]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn3) The Post reported the creation of a new conservative coalition “pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.” The leadership was listed as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council. A fourth individual, Jenny Beth Martin, is the founding director of the Tea Party Patriots. She would play a key role in organizing the events to come, including the doctors’ Washington “summit” in July.

Brandon, Nelson, and Martin are all prominent members of a secretive organization called the Council for National Policy,a shadowy coalition that coordinates initiatives among conservative megadonors, political operatives, and media owners, many of them Christian fundamentalists (see “Holding Democracy Hostage”).

The Post story quoted an interview with Richard Viguerie, a co-founder of the CNP, on the mission of the initiative: “The sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year. . . . Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”[[4]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn4)

The new coalition, called Save Our Country, officially debuted on April 27, as U.S. Covid deaths approached 55,000.[[5]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn5) Headed by economist Art Laffer, its maiden press release featured quotes from Brandon, Nelson, and Martin. “The long-term consequences of a prolonged societal shutdown outweigh the damage done by the virus itself,” Martin stated. “We must immediately reopen the economy.”[[6]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn6) Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the Save Our Country coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns: “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about protests across the country.”[[7]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn7)

But the state-level protests turned out to be of limited utility, and the group began to look for new avenues. In April, CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the CNP, began a series of weekly conference calls to discuss Covid strategy. On May 11—as U.S. Covid deaths reached 74,270[[8]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn8)—one of the calls was intercepted and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Associated Press.

Among the participants were CNP President William Walton, CNP member Nancy Schulze,[[9]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn9) and Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. Schulze, the wife of former nine-term Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Dick Schulze, opened the call with a warning that two-thirds of the American people were wary of reopening the economy. But, she added, “Doctors are seen by the American people—they have a 92 percent trust rate with the American people according to polling. . . . There is a coalition of doctors, doctors’ coalition, who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care, andthese doctors could be activated for this conversation now for reopening. NOTE RWI NICHE SLEEPER CELLS]

“The one thing the left does give credence to, in that they tend to be motivated by a secular worldview, the one thing that they do appreciate and listen to is science, and we have doctors that have the facts, that lived this themselves, that are in the trenches, that are saying it’s time to reopen,” Schulze continued. “I’ve been working with them for three years. There’s a coalition of doctors . . . including the most respected doctors in this country, that are ready to speak if somebody will just call on them.”

Walton told her, “We need to not just make the economic argument,we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us. THIRD PARTY TOBACCO PR BS And so that would be great if you, if we could tee that up.”

Schulze said she’d be happy to put him in touch “with any and all of these doctors, and I have submitted 27 of these doctors’ names to the campaign for the doctors’ coalition that they’re in the process of building.”

Mercedes Schlapp asked Schulze if she had spoken with Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign.“I know they’ve been working on building that coalition. I know they’re going through the vetting process right now. As long as you have the names, that would be helpful. . . . Those are the type of guys we want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message.”

Schulze replied, “I’ve been working with Hannah for over six weeks now, so they already have been vetted. But they need to be put on the screen.”[[10]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn10)

Dr. Simone Gold, a 54-year-old emergency physician from Los Angeles, was ready for her close-up. On April 22, Gold had tweeted a stand-up of herself wearing a white “Emergency Dept.” coat, in front of Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital emergency room, suggesting that concerns over the virus were inflated. She pointed out that the hospital “parking lots are empty, the emergency department volume is down, the patient census is down, and that’s really in most of the areas I’ve been to.”[[11]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn11)

On May 7, she brought a more explicit anti-lockdown message to a program on the Whiskey Politics show on Salem Radio, part of the massive Salem Media conglomerate owned by two leading members of the Council for National Policy.[[12]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn12) It was headlined “DR. SIMONE GOLD GOES PUBLIC! What the Government WON’T Tell Us About COVID-19.”

“It’s not at all clear that overall, that social distancing is going to make a huge impact,” Gold said.[[13]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn13) “We’re all acting like as though there’s a huge medical crisis. There’s a medical issue, we should handle it responsibly, but what’s going on in our country now is a terrible legal crisis. Our constitutional rights are being trampled on right and left.”[[14]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn14) Gold later added, “There’s always viruses . . . but I’m not sure that it’s front-page news.”[[15]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn15)

The Guardian reported that over the same period, the Save Our Country coalition spent $50,000 on videos on social media platforms “targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.”[16] GUK

On May 19—as U.S. Covid deaths reached 84,640[[17]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn17)—the CNP’s doctors coalition (billed as “A Doctor A Day”) made its debut with an open letter to Donald Trump signed by “500+ doctors” (a number that was later revised to over 800). “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” it stated. “It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold.

On June 16—with U.S. Covid deaths approaching 110,000[[18]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn18) and the U.S. economy in freefall—the Save Our Country coalition published an open letter to President Trump and Leader McConnell, urging “that the multi-trillions of dollars of federal government debt spending in the wake of the Coronavirus come to a stop.”[[19]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn19) Twelve of the 20 signatories (among them Brandon, Nelson, and Martin) were members of the CNP, including CNP President William Walton and Executive Director Bob McEwen.

The push to reopen the schools became a full-court press. On July 7, Trump assembled a White House meeting on the subject. Jenny Beth Martin spoke as both the CEO of Tea Party Patriots and “as a mom.”

“Mr. President, you were right, and I hope you will trust your instincts,” she told Trump. “America is not meant to be shut down. And we have to reopen schools this fall. I’ve been in touch with almost a thousand doctors from around the country. I helped Dr. Simone Gold spearhead a letter to you signed by 800 physicians and surgeons who talked about the side effects of the lockdowns. I’ve done a second letter with over 150 doctors, 240 nurses, 330 educators, 70 national groups, and thousands of parents and concerned Americans who want to see schools reopened.”

A video of Martin’s statement appeared, billed as “Mom Gives Unexpected Speech Directly to Trump” without naming her or her affiliation. It was posted on various social media platforms, including Glenn Beck’s YouTube channel, The Blaze (where it clocked over 400,000 views as of August 4).[[20]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn20)

Dr. Simone Gold was now preparing to join Jenny Beth Martin on center stage. On July 22, Gold warmed up for her appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, with over 157,000 YouTube subscribers. Kirk, a member of the Council for National Policy, heads a group called Turning Point USA, which recruits right-wing campus activists. (Donald Trump addressed its Youth Action Summit last December, and Donald Trump Jr. is quoted on its website stating, “I’m convinced that the work by Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk will win back the future of America.”)[[21]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn21)

The introduction for Kirk’s show summed up the case Gold and her colleagues would make over the coming weeks: “Charlie is joined in studio by board-certified emergency physician Dr. Simon [sic] Gold, who says nearly everything we’ve been told about the Chinese Coronavirus is a lie.She and Charlie take a deep dive into the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and why the U.S. government is barring physicians from prescribing the drug—endangering potentially 100,000 lives, at least. Charlie also takes on Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, asking if Dr. Gold challenges the effectiveness of wearing masks. Dr. Gold makes a stunning and factual assertion about the death rates and who exactly is to blame for what she believes is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the American people.” [[22]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn22)

Gold’s “stunning assertion” was the often-repeated claim that doctors were falsifying death certificates, speculating without foundation that they were inflating Covid-19 cases by “20 to 30 percent.”[[23]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn23) Gold also asserted, “Masks are really foolish, they don’t do anything. . . . There’s zero scientific justification for the mask.”[[24]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn24)

Jenny Beth Martin emphasized a social media campaign from the start. Her Tea Party Patriots website posted the program of the White Coat Summit, offering the participating doctors a two-hour session devoted to expanding their social media reach: “YouTube and other social media vastly exceed television news as the information source for most Americans. Interviews and Q/A with social media personalities with large followers is the best way to talk to Americans. Doctors who want to answer questions from these modern journalists will have the opportunity.”

By the time Jenny Beth Martin hosted Gold’s White Coat Summit on July 27, U.S. Covid-19 deaths had skyrocketed to over 136,000.[[25]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn25) The physicians’ presentation carried a lethal stew of misinformation. Dr. Bob Hamilton, a pediatrician from Santa Monica, assured viewers, “Children are not passing [the virus] on to their parents or their teachers.” (A few days later, the CDC released a report on a massive transmission event in June at a Georgia summer camp, with a median age of 12.[[26]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn26))

Dr. Richard Urso—an ophthalmologist—praised hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the virus,but it was not clear that Urso had ever had any significant experience treating Covid-19 patients. Another speaker was Dr. Daniel Erickson, a Bakersfield physician who co-owns an urgent care facility. In April he had been censured by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine for his “reckless and untested musings” opposing stay-at-home orders and promoting the conspiracy theory about doctors misattributing deaths to Covid-19.[[27]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn27)

The social media strategy paid off. Gold and her colleagues’ video, livestreamed on Breitbart News, reportedly reached 185,000 concurrent users.[[28]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn28) The New York Times’ Kevin Roose reported that over its six hours on Facebook, it was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views.[[29]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn29) (The audiences for network news broadcasts, by comparison, range from 9 to 12 million.) A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted the video to his 84.5 million followers. Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million Twitter followers, “This video is a much [sic] watch!!! So different from the narrative everyone is running with.”[[30]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn30) Trump redoubled his support at his press conference the following day, stating “I think they’re very respected doctors.”[[31]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn31)

But major social media platforms reacted with relative speed. Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies.[[32]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn32) Twitter took the unusual step of suspending Trump Jr.’s account for 12 hours.

Gold had built the original America’s Frontline Doctors website on a SquareSpace platform, but SquareSpace took it down. Gold rebuilt the website (omitting Stella Immanuel of “demon sperm” renown) and started raising money through PayPal and fundly.com. The doctors’ program also remained on the Tea Party Patriots site.

There was an additional reaction to the doctors’ “frontline” Covid credentials. MedPageToday, a peer-reviewed medical news site, was unable to find evidence that any of America’s Frontline Doctors in Washington had served in “frontline” emergency rooms during the Covid epidemic.[[33]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn33) Simone Gold came under additional scrutiny. Her initial Whiskey Politics introduction described her as a “frontline doctor” in an “inner-city emergency room” that treated “150 patients a day,” but neither her LinkedIn profile nor other available sources listed the emergency room in question. Her personal website (taken down amid the controversy but archived) described her as a “Concierge Immediate Needs Physician” working in “C-Suite Medicine.”[[34]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn34)

On July 29, Cedars-Sinai, the backdrop for Gold’s Twitter video, issued a disavowal stating, “Simone Gold, MD, has not worked with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center or any of its offices or affiliates since 2015. For three weeks in late 2015, Dr. Gold was employed on a per diem basis by Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, a component of Cedars-Sinai. She worked during this brief time in a network urgent care clinic. Dr. Gold is not authorized to represent or speak about any information on behalf of Cedars-Sinai.”

The sharecare.com “Find a Doctor” site stated that “Dr. Simone Gold, MD, is a[n] emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, CA. and is affiliated with Centinela Hospital Medical Center.” But on July 31, Centinela Hospital posted a statement reading: “Simone Gold, MD, is not credentialed as part of the Centinela Medical Staff, as she resigned her position here a number of years ago. Dr. Gold was never employed here as we don’t employ our physicians.”[[35]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn35)

Also troubling was American Frontline Doctors’ repeated suggestion that patients should demand hydroxychloroquine from their doctors for Covid-19. The medication has been an important treatment for lupus and other autoimmune diseases, but the publicity around its application to Covid has created an ongoing shortage with devastating consequences.

Much of the mainstream coverage of America’s Frontline Doctors was devoted to Stella Immanuel’s “demon sperm” sermon, but alternative platforms were another story.

Simone Gold was reaching a vast new public and was now celebrated as a victim. On July 30, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson interviewed her on his nightly program. The crawl stated, “Doctor Censored by Big Tech Has Now Lost Her Job” (though that job was never specified)—echoing Trump’s executive order on Big Tech censorship released the previous day.[[36]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn36) (Carlson’s show is currently the highest-rated program on cable television, with an audience of over 4.3 million.[[37]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn37))

Glenn Beck’s multi-platform media operation, The Blaze, covered the story on his radio program and posted the Tucker Carlson video on its website on July 31, with a companion piece repeating her case for hydroxychloroquine.[[38]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn38) A similar report was posted the same day on CNS News, founded by Council for National Policy Executive Committee member L. Brent Bozell III.[[39]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn39) (MediaPost recently named CNS News as the country’s fastest-growing conservative website, with more than 8.3 million unique visitors in June and over 1,000 percent gain in year-over-year unique visitors.[[40]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn40))

Pat Robertson’s CBN.com averages over four million unique visitors each month. Add these to Alex Jones’s August 21 coverage—as well as legions of subsidiary platforms—and you have a deadly misinformation campaign that’s reaching tens of millions of voters, most of them off the radar of the national news media.

Emergency physician Nick Sawyer is disturbed by the implications for medical practitioners. The America’s Frontline Doctors campaign, he says, “violates two of the primary principles of medical ethics. Medical ethics has four major principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. As hydroxychloroquine offers no clinical benefit and may be harmful, it violates the first two tenets. Further, their statements place actual frontline physicians treating patients with Covid-19 in conflict with patients’ right to autonomy.

“Patients have the right to make decisions regarding their medical care, but as more and more patients are asking—if not outright demanding—that physicians prescribe hydroxychloroquine to them, it places these physicians in a position where they are faced with an ethical dilemma. We respect patients’ right to autonomy, but we are not willing to allow them to demand a treatment that is not helpful and may be harmful. In sum, America’s Frontline Doctors are introducing additional havoc into the already complex Covid-19 pandemic.”

As of the publication deadline for this article, neither Jenny Beth Martin or Simone Gold had responded to requests for comment.

The day after Gold’s Washington presentation, U.S. Covid-19 deaths stood at 140,309; they swelled to 147,653 only a week later.[[41]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn41) Less than a month later, on August 21, Donald Trump addressed the Council for National Policy at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, his last major address before the Republican convention. In his opening remarks, he thanked several figures from the CNP, including Jenny Beth Martin, “for your tremendous leadership of the CNP. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

As of that Friday, over 174,000 Americans had died of Covid-19. That number continues to climb.[[42]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn42)

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She is the recipient of the Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research. 

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pence-to-speak-to-secretive-council-for-national-policy-friday-cnp-members-involved-in-saturdays-stop-the-steal-rally/

no twt

As the results of the 2020 presidential election came rolling in, Vice President Mike Pence was notably out of sight ​and had even planned a Florida vacation for this week. But with ​the ratcheting up of Trump’s campaign to contest the outcome of the election, CNN reported that Pence canceled his getaway, remaining inside the Beltway ​to address the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization that includes some of the most powerful conservatives in the country.

As Pence stands at the podium before marquee names in conservative politics Friday, pro-Trump, far-right activists are making their way to Washington, D.C., for a rally organized and supported by some of the very right-wing leaders likely sitting in that room.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars network are leading a caravan of Trump supporters to D.C.,Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia has promised to station his armed men outside of the District borders should Trump call on them, and the Proud Boys hate group has encouraged its members to to the nation’s capital, with leader Enrique Tarrio declaring Trump’s “Standby order has been rescinded.” 

They, along with other ​conspiracy theorists, far-right groups and other Trump loyalists, have all promised to go to the Saturday event that goes by three names​: Million MAGA March, March for Trump, and Stop the Steal—to push a false narrative that voter fraud cost Trump the election. The event has been promoted by Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

GOP operative Ali Alexander,who organized the gathering, was clear on the rally’s demands in a ​Nov. 10 Periscopepost. “We’re going down to the Supreme Court,​” he said, “and we’re telling our government that this election and the counting will be transparent, or we’ll get a new election. One or another.”

And they wouldn’t be on their way without​ the leadership and support of current and past Council for National Policy members for the Stop the Steal campaign. ​The CNP, which has been around since the Reagan administration, holds closed-door meetings, tells members not to speak to the press about the council, and has tried to keep membership rolls private, but its members’ names have leaked over the years.

Notable CNP members include Ginni Thomas, the influential wife of Clarence Thomas, and Tony Perkins, a former president of the organization and the current president of the Family Research Council, according to a 2020 membership directory published by Documented. CNP has also welcomed far-right figures like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstructionist Michael Peroutka, a major funder of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s advocacy and political career.

CNP ​also counts among its members Ed Martin of ​Phyllis Schlafly Eagles,Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who has allied himself with dominionists and Christian nationalists in the past year—all of whom have pushed ​Stop the Steal messaging since Alexander launched the campaign and called on them to join it. 

Martin has led sparsely attended D.C. rallies and blasted Phyllis Schlafly Eagles’ email list with Stop the Steal talking points, while Kirk attended a rally in Phoenix and took to conservative media to promote it. Though it does not appear Fitton has used the #StoptheSteal hashtag, he has echoed the campaign’s language, alleged an “electoral coup,” accusedstates of voter fraud, and called for votes to stop being counted in others.

Amy Kremer, who was listed as a member in a 2014 membership directory obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is organizing in the state of Georgia for Stop the Steal events.Even Ali Alexander, who formerly went by Ali Akbar, is listed twice by both names as a signee on a 2017 letter from CNP to Donald Trump obtained by the Christian Post. David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy has also reported on some of these connections.

On Nov. 4, as Americans ​awoke to see Trump’s election night lead overtaken by the counting of mail-in ballots, which came in record numbers for Joe Biden, Alexander was expressed dismay. On Twitter, he suggested that the Republican Party should have adopted his 2018 Stop the Steal operation, which he had launched with ​the help of Trump confidant and since convicted felon Roger Stone​ during the recount of Florida’s 2018 U.S. Senate race. 

​On the day after the 2020 election, Alexander said he had no intention of rebooting it, but about an hour later, he suggested the only way he would restart the operation would be if a few key players were on board—among them, Tom Fitton, Amy Kremer, and Ed Martin. By around 2 p.m. that day, he’d added Charlie Kirk and others to the list.

"he’s decided only to do it under certain conditions and those conditions seem to be CNP support,” ​said Stephanie Lamy, a French information warfare researcher with Danaides who flagged the series of tweets​. “That’s very clear from this tweet by the people he mentions.”

And there’s good reason to ​seek CNP support given its power and its expertise in ​advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud narratives.

Last month, The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow got ​his hands on videos from an Aug. 21 CNP conference held at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Fitton, who Alexander called on to be in charge of the legal aspect of the ​Stop the Steal campaign, zeroed in on mail-in voting.“We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton said. “But this is a crisis that we’re not prepared for. I mean, our side is not prepared for.”

J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also attacked mail-in voting at that meeting, telling activists, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.” Adams, a known voter suppressor, was also part of Trump administration’s short-lived “Commission on Election Integrity,” which folded after findingno evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Adams’ legal organization has issued two lawsuits since Nov. 4 claimingvoter fraud.

Current CNP Treasurer Kenneth Blackwell has promoted Stop the Steal on Twitterand Facebook and, as Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery reported, baselessly charged Monday that “the Democrat-run Pennsylvania executive government only wants votes counted that support their agenda and their candidates.”

Trump himself has addressed CNP members—as recently as the Aug. 21 meeting and in the beginning of his campaign in 2015. According to The National Review, of the six Republican presidential candidates who addressed CNP in 2015, Trump was the “star attraction.”

Tags: Ali AkbarAli Alexander Amy Kremer Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Ed Martin Ginni Thomas J Christian Adams Ken Blackwell Michael Peroutka Mike Pence Tom Fitton Tony Perkins Disinformation Stop the Steal  Voter Fraud  Council for National Policy

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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 thehymn, 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

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/after-report-trump-campaign-push-organize-anti-lockdown-doctors-fox-news

no lnx pix vid

After AP report on Trump campaign push to organize anti-lockdown doctors, Fox News pushes letter from new doctor group

Fox “news”-side anchor complains that people “who have non-COVID related problems” aren’t getting care

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 05/21/20 12:00 PM EDT

Fox News is now hyping what appears to be a coordinated effort by pro-Trump groups and the Trump campaign to put forward a separate narrative from another group of doctors who are speaking out against official guidance from experts about safety measures to battle the coronavirus pandemic and instead urging the quick reopening of businesses and the end of shelter-in-place orders.

On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported on a May 11 conference call “with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign,” which was organized by an affiliate of the right-wing Council for National Policy.

During the call, Republican activist Nancy Schulze “said she had given the campaign a list of 27 doctors prepared to defend Trump’s reopening push.” According to Schulze, “There is a coalition of doctors who are extremely pro-Trump that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care.” She further added: “And we have doctors that are … in the trenches, that are saying ‘It’s time to reopen.’”

Another participant on the call was Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, the organization that hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Schlapp is also a frequent guest on Fox News and appeared on the network in early March to downplay the danger of the virus while he was isolating at home, after having potentially been exposed to someone during the recent CPAC event who later tested positive for COVID-19.

“The president’s going to get tagged by the fake news media as being irresponsible and not listening to doctors,” Schlapp said on the reported conference call. “And so we have to gird his loins with a lot of other people. So I think what Nancy’s talking about … this is the critical juncture that we highlight them.”

And today, Fox News ran an article featuring a public letter from a new group called “A Doctor a Day,” formed to oppose the lockdown efforts. Currently at over 600 signatures, the letter calls the economic shutdown a “mass casualty incident” resulting in people missing medical appointments for other conditions and experiencing the potentially devastating health effects of financial uncertainty.

As the AP noted, the lead signatory of the letter is Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency medicine specialist. Gold is also a member of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative groups pushing to reopen businesses. The Council for National Policy, the group that organized the May 11 call, is also a member of that coalition. Gold denied to the AP that she was coordinating her efforts with the Trump campaign: “But put this in there: I’m honored to be considered.”

Gold also told Fox News that her push to quickly reopen the economy is “causing a big misunderstanding about what I'm doing so I actually think I'm just going to take my name off [from the Save Our Country Coalition] because it's not really supposed to be political.”

The letter received a glowing mention in the opening block of Thursday’s edition of Fox & Friends.

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CitationFrom the May 21, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Well, Steve, all of this as hundreds of doctors have joined the call — these are doctors, keep in mind — to end the stringent stay-at-home orders. More than 600 sending a letter to President Trump calling this lockdown a, quote, “massive casualty incident,” saying that Americans are putting themselves at risk by missing routine appointments. Isn't that interesting? Because we hear all these expert doctors say, don't open too quickly. But then you have this other group that's saying, look, if you look at the statistics, it shows states that are reopening, many of them don't have as many cases now, they're doing better. And potentially, you've got suicides that are up, you've got — people are drinking during the day now. They're worried about alcoholism killing people, and they're worried about domestic violence as well, Brian.

At about the same time, the letter was being covered as a seemingly straightforward news headline on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.

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CitationFrom the May 21, 2020, edition Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo

The coverage continued on Fox’s purported “news”-side program, with America’s Newsroom co-anchor Ed Henry interviewing Gold after announcing that “doctors across America” are “now voicing concerns about extended lockdowns.” During the interview, Henry voiced concerns about people suffering from ailments other than COVID-19:

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CitationFrom the May 21, 2020, edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom

ED HENRY (CO-ANCHOR): You know, my son has a tennis coach, and he was very upset this week because the tennis coach basically had a stroke a few weeks ago. And nobody found him initially, because he lived alone, and rather than going to the tennis courts — the tennis courts were locked down — so this coach went days without getting medical attention. And his friends are now deeply concerned about the impact. I'd imagine there are people around the country who have non-COVID related problems that they're not getting taken care of.

DR. SIMONE GOLD: So, you don't have to imagine. I've had thousands upon thousands of these stories. The New England Journal of Medicine published an article — a letter to the editor, May 8, documenting that 40% of stroke or stroke-like patients didn't show up. Journal of Cardiology, I think JACC [Journal of the American College of Cardiology], really documented the same thing about stroke patients. I could read you heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story sent to me by physicians of patients that have died or suffered severe harm because they were afraid to go to the hospital and their own doctors' offices were shut. There are tragic stories, patients in nursing homes who have no visitors, whose mental health has deteriorated. There's just — it's just — we just want America to hear the story. We feel like there is one narrative out there — and that's OK, but you need to hear the whole picture, the rest of the story. We feel like that one opinion is not sufficient and that the second opinion of all these thousands of doctors needs to be heard.

Given the remarks Henry made about “people around the country who have non-COVID related problems that they're not getting taken care of,” it might also be worth examining the actual text of the letter and what the signatories explained they meant when they described the shutdown as a “mass casualty incident.”

During a mass casualty incident, victims are immediately triaged to black, red, yellow, or green. The first group, triage level black, includes those who require too many resources to save during a mass crisis. The red group has severe injuries that are survivable with treatment, the yellow group has serious injuries that are not immediately life threatening, and the green group has minor injuries.

The red group receives highest priority. The next priority is to ensure that the other two groups do not deteriorate a level. Decades of research have shown that by strictly following this algorithm, we save the maximum number of lives.

Millions of Americans are already at triage level red. These include 150,000 Americans per month who would have had a new cancer detected through routine screening that hasn’t happened, millions who have missed routine dental care to fix problems strongly linked to heart disease/death, and preventable cases of stroke, heart attack, and child abuse. Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%.

Tens of millions are at triage level yellow. Liquor sales have increased 300-600%, cigarettes sales have increased, rent has gone unpaid, family relationships have become frayed, and millions of well-child check-ups have been missed.

Hundreds of millions are at triage level green. These are people who currently are solvent, but at risk should economic conditions worsen. Poverty and financial uncertainty is closely linked to poor health.

In this analogy of the shutdown as a “mass casualty incident,” no explanation is given for who the “triage level black” group — those people who “require too many resources to save during a mass crisis” and thus must be abandoned in order to save the rest — might actually represent.

But given the active push by Fox News hosts for the mass reopening of businesses, even if the vulnerable suffer, and their willingness to accept preventable deaths of more coronavirus patients, the answer would seem pretty clear.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/will-impeachment-stymie-this-powerful-groups-plans-for-mike-pence

no lnx

Will impeachment stymie this powerful group’s plans for Mike Pence?

Written by Anne Nelson / Salon October 25, 2019

With the prospect of an impeachment looming over Washington this month, the conversation has naturally turned to Vice President Mike Pence — both as a possible successor to the presidency and as a possible candidate for impeachment himself. Standing in the eye of the storm, on October 5 Pence chose to tweet a photo of himself at the podium of an organization that is unknown to most Americans.

@VP

The Council for National Policy is one of the oldest & most effective organizations in the history of the conservative movement. Thank you Congressman McEwen & the more than 400 fellow conservatives for coming out & fighting for the principles that have made this country great!

“The Council for National Policy is one of the oldest and most effective organizations in the history of the conservative movement,” he wrote. He thanked former Ohio congressman (and CNP executive director) Bob McEwen “and the more than 400 fellow conservatives for coming out & fighting for the principles that have made this country great!”

Pence’s anodyne statement can be viewed as both life insurance for his career and the ongoing repayment of an old debt. The reasons have less to do with Trump than with the inner workings of the Republican Party.

Over the past few decades the traditional GOP has been overtaken by partisans of the Radical Right, now entrenched in the party’s infrastructure. This shadow network of hardline organizations, activists and donors stands ready to outlast the Trump presidency.The story of the CNP, a hub in this network, is a case study in how the durability and strategic capacity of right-wing institutions has shaped the American political landscape.

The Council for National Policy had its origins in the Southwest, where the social agenda of Christian fundamentalists and the economic interests of the oil industry converged. They founded the CNP in 1981 to capitalize on the election of Ronald Reagan; Reagan’s former attorney general, Edwin Meese III, would serve as the CNP’s president from 1993-1997.

The organization meets several times a year, maintaining secrecy for its membership and its proceedings. But a 2014 membership roster was leaked and published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, illustrating the span of the political network: major donors such as the DeVos family; evangelical powerhouses such as Southern Baptist leader Richard Land; and heads of influential media interests, including the Salem Media conglomerate. Kellyanne Conway has belonged to the CNP’s executive committee, and Jay Sekulow, lead attorney on Trump’s personal legal team, has served on the board of governors. The organization also, critically, includes the heads of membership organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony List (a group that funds anti-choice candidates), whose ground troops can be deployed in coordinated political canvassing. In the words of former CNP president Richard DeVos (father-in-law to Education Secretary Betsy), the CNP convenes the “donors and the doers.”

The CNP has played the long game in Washington, using its ability to activate evangelical voting blocs as its political capital, building up influence in the statehouses and pushing the GOP ever farther to the right. Over time, the CNP partnerships evolved into a well-oiled machine, in which big money, regional broadcasters and ground troops advanced its interests in ways that were often neglected by the national news media. Mike Pence appeared at various stages of his career. One co-founder, Morton Blackwell, claims to have trained some 200,000 conservative candidates and political activists through his Leadership Institute — among them Mike Pence.  Another co-founder, ideological architect Paul Weyrich, instituted a celebrated weekly lunch not far from the Capitol to talk strategy. Congressman Mike Pence briefed the group on a weekly basis. In 2006 the New York Times quoted Weyrich’s verdict on Pence: “He is what I’ve been waiting for in terms of leadership.”

After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the donor networks of the CNP, fueled by the DeVos family’s Amway fortune, converged with those of the Koch brothers.Their digital campaigns and grassroots activism converged as well. The heads of Koch-backed organizations — including Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party Patriots — joined the Council for National Policy, and CNP donors funded Koch initiatives. In 2012 Democrats celebrated Obama’s reelection, but Republican efforts to cultivate state-level politics were paying off. Despite the Democrats gaining a national plurality of over 1.4 million votes in the House elections, Republicans won back the House with a margin of 17 seats, giving them power over the budgetary process.

The CNP partners’ long-term strategy identified some 17 million politically unengaged evangelicals, many concentrated in swing states, and sought ways to drive them to the polls. Focus groups found that this demographic could be motivated by scare tactics involving abortion and LGBT rights. These voters have been bombarded with falsehoods: Democrats conspire to “execute babies on the day of their birth”; schoolchildren face a mortal danger of sexual assault by transgender people using public restrooms. Swing state voters encountered these campaigns on radio broadcasts from CNP partner networks, in church sanctuaries from partner “ministries” and on social media, fueled by partner memes. They were complemented by grassroots canvassing run by CNP members, including the NRA, the Susan B. Anthony List and Americans for Prosperity.

In 2016, CNP members played a critical role in bridging the chasm between the evangelical base and Trump, overcoming objections to Trump’s character flaws and spiritual deficits.

CNP members Marjorie Dannenfelser and Penny Nance had signed an “anyone but Trump” letter to Iowa voters; Southern Baptist Richard Land and his fellow editors at the Christian Post described him as “exceptionally bad.”But CNP president Tony Perkins and strategist Ralph Reed kept their options open. Trump rode the wave of the primaries on the strength of his celebrity, but he lacked campaign funds, strategy and ground troops. The CNP partners could offer him all three — under certain conditions.

On June 21, 2016, Perkins hosted some 1,000 fundamentalist leaders at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square to allow Trump to make his case, sharing the stage with a panoply of CNP all-stars. Trump emerged with their full support. In return, CNP members received an Evangelical Advisory Board stacked with CNP members, a leading role in writing the social planks of the Republican platform, and, crucially, a decisive say in federal judicial nominations — their most powerful lever for reshaping the national landscape. By mid-July Trump also replaced his previous choices for running mate with Mike Pence.

Pence’s career now hangs in the balance, and much will depend on how closely he’s tied to Trump’s actions — even if Trump is only impeached and not convicted. But the Council for National Policy has looked ahead. Operating on the principle of “an heir and a spare,” it conspicuously auditioned Nicky Haley at its 2018 meeting.

The strategists of the CNP are keenly aware of the formula that won them the White House in 2016: Hillary Clinton’s campaign, focused on the national media, won the popular election by three million votes, but lost the Electoral College by some 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The CNP may be hoping for a repeat: wagering that the impeachment furor in Washington will play out in the national media without moving the swing states — and that the Democrats will be too distracted by the drama to notice.

Anne Nelson (@anelsona) is the author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” out this month from Bloomsbury.

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More than the 150 members of the secretive right-wing network known as the Council for National Policy have signed a letter calling on President Trump to sign an executive order “protecting the practical exercise of religious freedom,” something Religious Right leaders have been clamoring for since Trump took office. On Wednesday, Fox News pundit and serial promoter of bogus religious persecution stories Todd Starnes outed himself as a member of the CNP in writing about the letter.

The Council for National Policy is a network of leaders from the religious and political right, whose membership includes both big names and lesser-known fringe figures. A 2014 membership list obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that the CNP even has room for extremists like neo-confederate Christian Reconstructionist Michael Peroutka. According to Starnes, who says Trump’s election was the result of divine intervention, other signers include “CNP President Tony Perkins, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, Morton Blackwell, Bob McEwen, Kelly Shackelford, Becky Norton Dunlop, Chad Connelly, Dr. James Dobson and Penny Nance.”

A month ago, Sarah Posner reported in The Nation on a leaked draft of the executive order, which legal experts said was of “sweeping” and “staggering” scope. If signed it would create wholesale exemptions from a range of nondiscrimination laws and regulations “for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.” The order could empower government employees to refuse to provide basic government services to gay people or couples or unmarried parents.

Posner’s article quotes a Lambda Legal attorney who says the draft order is similar to a law signed by the Mississippi governor last year, “which a federal district court ruled violated both the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.” That case is on appeal.

The desire to get federal courts to embrace the right’s vision of religious liberty was one of the major reasons Religious Right leaders rallied around Trump after he promised them the Supreme Court of their dreams. In that regard, it is noteworthy that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch ruled as an appeals court judge in the Hobby Lobby case, which for the first time gave for-profit corporations the right to claim exemption from laws protecting their employees based on the religious beliefs of the company and its owners. That’s a major reason that the Religious Right is thrilled about the Gorsuch nomination.

Tags: Becky Norton DunlopBob McEwenChad ConnellyEd MeeseJames DobsonKelly ShackelfordMorton BlackwellNeil GorsuchPenny NancyTodd StarnesTony PerkinsChurch-StateReligious LibertySupreme CourtCouncil for National PolicyFox News Channel

Why Has The Religious Right Embraced Neo-Confederate Michael Peroutka?

ByMiranda Blue | May 18, 2016 11:55 am

Our friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center have obtained a copy of the 2014 membership list of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group [led by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins](https://www.nationaljournal.com/twentysixteen/2015/04/15/conservative-leaders-plan-two-secret-meetings-aimed-picking-2016-candidate "https://www.nationaljournal.com/twentysixteen/2015/04/15/conservative-leaders-plan-two-secret-meetings-aimed-picking-2016-candidate

Ctrl+Click or tap to follow the link") that includes a who’s who of leaders of the Religious Right and the wider conservative movement who work together to influence national politics. (In 2014, Perkins was the group’s vice president.) We’ve known from news reports that CNP’s membership includes a wide range of Religious Right leaders, but one name on the list obtained by SPLC stood out: Michael Peroutka.

Peroutka, who made his fortune with a family debt-collection business, has become a minor benefactor to the Religious Right, including funding anti-choice groups, bankrolling some of the campaigns and advocacy work of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore (who is currently suspended for attempting to defy the federal courts on marriage equality), and, maybe most notably, donating a million-dollar dinosaur skeleton to a creationist group.

Peroutka runs the Institute on the Constitution, a Christian Reconstructionist groupthat argues for the enforcement of a particular interpretation of biblical law. For instance, Peroutka has suggested that all laws passed by the Maryland legislature are invalidbecause the legislature became an invalid body when it violated “God’s law” and passed marriage equality legislation.

Most troubling, Peroutka has a history as a neo-Confederate activist, including spending time on the board of the secessionist League of the South. In a 2004 speech to the group, Peroutkasaid that he was “still angry” that Maryland failed to secede from the Union during the Civil War. At the group’s 2012 convention, Peroutka led attendeesin a spirited rendition of “Dixie,” which he referred to as “the national anthem”: [vid]

Peroutka was appointed to the board of the League of the Southin 2013, the year before the CNP membership list obtained by SPLC was published. He quit the group in late 2014 as he ran for a local government seat in his home state of Maryland, unconvincingly claiming that he hadn’t been aware of the group’s racism.

Peroutka ended up winning a seat on the county council of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, after his openly gay Democratic opponent was hit with nasty anti-LGBT robocalls that were later tied to Peroutka’s advisers.

CNP’s membership list is closely guarded and new members can join only by invitation. This means that Peroutka didn’t just show up unannounced: He was invited to join a group that includes Perkins, the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, Alliance Defending Freedom’s Alan Sears and many other high-profile conservative activists.

We don’t know if Peroutka is still a member of the group. But even by the time CNP’s 2014 membership directory was published, there was already plenty of public information available about his troubling ideology. Why was the leadership of the Religious Right willing to invite Peroutka into their fold?

Tags: Alan SearsBrian BrownMat StaverMichael PeroutkaTony PerkinsAlliance Defending FreedomCouncil for National PolicyFamily Research CouncilInstitute on the ConstitutionLiberty CounselNational Organization for Marriage

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretiveCouncil for National Policy last month. TheCNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations.Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political tricksterJames O’Keefe;Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell;and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism.

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Tags: Bill MeierlingCleta MitchellGinni ThomasJames O'KeefeRichard ViguerieElection 2020Seven MountainsALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilCouncil for National Policy

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The two political operatives chosen earlier this month to lead Donald Trump’s presidential campaign after two former managers departed have been members of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), Hatewatch has learned

Longtime Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News operation, were named on Aug. 17 as, respectively, the Trump campaign’s manager and its chief executive officer. The appointment of Bannon was by far the more controversial choice, given his role at a “news” outlet known for bashing immigrants, Muslims, women and others.

The CNP is an intensely secretive and shadowy group of what The New York Times once described as “the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It is so tight-lipped that it tells people not to admit their membership or even name the group. Revealing when or where the group meets, or what it discusses, is also forbidden. The organization, which can only be joined by invitation and at a cost of thousands of dollars, strives mightily to keep its membership rolls secret.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which publishes Hatewatch, obtained a copy this spring of the CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a closely held document. It shows that Conway was a member of the CNP’s executive committee that year, and that Bannon was a regular member. It is not known if they remain.

The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.

They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

Bannon was already controversial. His Breitbart news operation has specialized in extreme-right propaganda that is summed up in some of the headlines it ran while under his stewardship: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews,” “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner Over Religious Beliefs” and so on. Breitbart also recently published a defense of the “Alternative Right” that included defending well-known white supremacist ideologues Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.

It’s not known how their contacts within the CNP may have affected Conway and Bannon. But as the SPLC concluded in its May report on the CNP: “At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.”

That is as true of campaign leaders as it is of political candidates.

no link

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/08/31/revealed-conway-bannon-members-secretive-group

Why is the man who stole Ohio campaigning with a white supremacist?

by Bob Fitrakis

by Harvey Wasserman

OCTOBER 9, 2006

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the man who stole Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, was out campaigning October 4, 2006 with a man widely viewed as one of America’s leading white supremacists. Blackwell is an African-American.

He is also the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. As Secretary of State, he was the GOP point man for stealing the 2004 presidential vote that gave George W. Bush a second term. As co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Blackwell engineered a complex strategy of confusion, disenfranchisement and theft that mirrored what was done by Katherine Harris in Florida 2000. Harris was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat, and is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Polls show Blackwell trailing between 12-20 points in his gubernatorial race, but few Ohio insiders doubt his ability to steal the necessary votes, if he can get away with it. Currently, Blackwell operatives are stressing that he’s “only 12 points down” and that they believe the race will tighten significantly by Election Day.

Blackwell toured the state with Larry Pratt, author of ARMED PEOPLE VICTORIOUS, which advocates the creation of militant right-wing militias. Pratt has spoken and shared platforms in the past with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Aryan Nation members. He was forced to take a leave of absence from Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign over charges of white supremacist and anti-semitic views. Pratt’s 150,000-member Gun Owners of America is proudly to the right of the National Rifle Association.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, Pratt says he couldn’t be a racist because he is campaigning with Blackwell, an African-American. Blackwell is “our kind of guy,” says Pratt, in reference to Blackwell’s support of gun owners’ rights.

Blackwell campaign spokesperson attorney Eric Seabrook, conceded on Sunday, October 8 to the Khari Enaharo show listeners on 98.9FM radio that Pratt was a white supremacist but, he stressed “it was all about the gun rights issue.”

But this is not the first time Blackwell has lined up with extreme right-wing backers boasting racist and anti-semitic roots. Earlier this year Blackwell posted on his website a picture of himself addressing the Council for National Policy. The CNP has deep “neo-fascist” and Ku Klux Klan ties according to Chip Berlet of the Boston-based Political Research Associates. In addition to right wing extremists such as Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Robertson, the CNP embraces a broad spectrum of powerful, reactionary bigots. 

Among them are members of the Ahmanson family, major funders of extremist publications and electronic voting machines. The Ahmanson’s financial and political ties are thoroughly intertwined with both ES&S and Diebold, mainstays of the electronic hardware used to steal the Ohio vote. Among their associates are Bob and Todd Urosevich, whose executive and programming work has helped shape the two voting machine companies.

Others associated with the CNP include:

Richard Shoff, a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Indiana.

John McGoff, an ardent supporter of the former apartheid South African regime.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theological leader of America's "Christian Reconstruction" movement, which advocates that Christian fundamentalists take "dominion" over America by abolishing democracy and instituting Old Testament Law. Rushdoony's Reconstructionalists believe that "homosexuals . . . adulterers , blasphemers, astrologers and others will be executed," along with disobedient children.

Reed Larson, head of anti-union National Right to Work Committee.

Don Wildmon, TV censorship activist and accused anti-Semite.

Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other principals from the Iran-Contra Scandal.

After a public uproar, Blackwell pulled his CNP photo off his website. But he has thus far made no similar backtrack on Larry Pratt. “We’re happy to have his support,” says a campaign spokesman, reported the Dispatch.

Blackwell supporters continue to predict he will make a “last-minute surge” to win the governor’s race. Making no visible moves toward the mainstream, Blackwell may well be banking on two bottom lines in Bush-era electoral politics: loaded guns and rigged voting machines.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just published by the New Press. Fitrakis is an independent candidate for governor of Ohio, endorsed by the Green Party.

==

==

BW bk:

erik p sold co 1.3b$; wife cnp (fdr lehaye, turn am rt; CFR too liberal) , frc

cnp: fallwell, schasfly, robertson, perkins dobson baur, r reed; norquust, north, gaffney, NRA lapierre; visits by DC, bolton, rumy, ashcroft, senor, delay, frist

10. Council for National Policy

Revenue: $1,976,747

The Council for National Policy exists to do just one thing: organize meetings of right-wing operatives, Religious Right leaders and wealthy business interests at posh hotels around the country to share ideas, plot strategy and vet GOP presidential candidates. Membership is by invitation only, and the group seeks no media attention. Despite its small size and shadowy operations, the CNP – founded by Religious Right godfather Tim LaHaye – wields a great deal of influence, showing that even organizations with modest budgets can have a significant impact. U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), after his now-infamous “legitimate rape��� comment, showed up at the next CNP meeting to ensure ongoing financial support as he runs for the U.S. Senate. Heritage Foundation Vice President Becky Norton Dunlopcurrently serves as CNP president, with Phyllis Schlafly and FRC’s Tony Perkins also taking leadership roles.

The CNP: manipulating religion to political ends

Many of the religious evangelical groups in America are coordinated top-down by a secretive organization called the Committee on National Policy. Former close Bush adviser, Rev. Ted Haggard, was a member of the Committee on National Policy until a sex and drugs scandal forced him out in late 2006.

Haggard was Pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs described as the ‘evangelical Vatican,’ and was head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Ted Haggard was also a member of a highly significant and little-understood sect known as Joelâ��™s Army or the Manifest Sons of God, the same circles which spawned Sarah Palin.

Another noteworthy member of the CNP as was Grover Norquist, the man once described as the ‘Field Marshall of the Bush Plan.’

The CNP, created in the early 1980’s during the Reagan era, is the nexus for several odd and quite powerful organizations. It was described by ABC's Marc J. Ambinder as â€��the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations.’ CNP Members include names such as General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Edwin J. Feulner Jr of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and most of the prominent names in the Christian Right around Bush. It has included prominent politicians including Senator Trent Lott, Senator Don Nickles, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Col. Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, and Right-wing philanthropist Else Prince, mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater the controversial private security firm.1

CNP members have also included not only the Rev. Sun Myung Moon Unification Church, definitely a bizarre formation whose founder openly states that he is superior to Christ. The CNP as well reportedly includes the Church of Scientology.2

CNP member and GOP strategist, Gary Bauer, links both. Bauer’s Family Research Council was a signatory of the Scientology Pledge to remove psychology from California schools and replace it with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Bauer was also a speaker at Sun Myung Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification Conference in 1996.

Religious researchers Paul and Phillip Collins describe the CNP as follows: ‘The CNP appears to be a creation of factions of the power elite designed to mobilize well-meaning Christians to unwittingly support elite initiatives. The CNP could also be considered a project in religious engineering that empties Christianity of its metaphysical substance and re-conceptualizes many of its principles and concepts according to the socially and politically expedient designs of the elite. These contentions are supported by the fact that many CNP members are also members of other organizations and/or criminal enterprises that are tied directly to the power elite.’3

In order to shape public debate over the course of national military and foreign as well as domestic policy, the US establishment had to create mass-based organizations to manipulate public opinion in ways contrary to the self-interest of the majority of the American people. The Committee on National Policy was formed to be a central part of this mass manipulation.

The Committee on National Policy is a vital link between multi-billion dollar defense contractors, Washington lobbyists like the convicted felon and Republican fundraiser, Jack Abramoff, and the Christian Right. It’s at the heart of a new axis between right-wing military politics, support for the Pentagon war agenda globally and the neo-conservative political control of much of US foreign and defense policy.

The CNP has been at the center of Karl Rove’s carefully-constructed Bush political machine. Tom Delay and dozens of top Bush Administration Republicans are or had been members of the CNP. Few details about the organization are leaked to the public. As secretive as the Bilderberg Group if not more so, the CNP releases no press statements, meets in secret and never reveals names of its members willingly.

The elite circles behind the Bush Presidency have crafted an extremely powerful political machine using the forces and energies of the Christian Right and millions of American Christians unaware of the darker manipulations. Is Sarah Palin a part of such darker manipulations?

==

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

[updated intro 7/13:

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a shadowy, secretive group dubbed "Sith Lords of the Ultra-Right"by the liberal blog DailyKos.[1] Mark Crispin Millercalled CNP a "highly secretive... theocratic organization -- what they want is basically religious rule" (A Patriot Act). Their membership (see below) is a Who's Who list of the biggest names of the Radical Right.

"The CNP describes itself as a counterweight against liberal domination of the American agenda," reported ABC News.[2]

CNP's membership is comprised of leaders in the family values, national defense and decency movements woven by members of theDead Billionaires Club like the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch brothers, Richard DeVos, Richard Scaife and other billionaires and foundations who have invested heavily in developing a complex web of far-Right groups, think-tanks and politicians over the last forty years to return the United States to its pre Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 19th century capitalist roots.[3]

Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the New York Times about the CNP meeting ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention, "The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week."[4]

"Utah Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Holland said that the Council for National Policy meeting gives [the public] 'a rare opportunity to see - or more accurately not see - what Republicans are all about. And that is how policy is influenced in this country by what amounts to a secret society of far-right-wing conservatives and religious extremists.'" [5]

]]

The Council for National Policy is a secretive forum that was formed in 1981 by Tim LaHaye as a networking tool for leading US conservative political leaders, financiers and religious right activist leaders. The group, which meets three times a year, promotes "Educational conferences for national leaders in the fields of business, government, religion and academia to explore national policy alternatives. Weekly newsletters are distributed to all members to keep them apprised of member activities and public policy issues. A semi-annual journal is produced from membership meeting speeches."[1]

In 2001, ABC News reported: "The CNP describes itself as a counterweight against liberal domination of the American agenda."[2]

Others are not so kind to the organization and its motives. Mark Crispin Miller states that the CNP is a "highly secretive... theocratic organization -- what they want is basically religious rule" (*A Patriot Act*). Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the New York Times about the CNP meeting ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention, "The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week."[3^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-Kirk-2)

--

  1. Council for National Policy

Revenue: $1,976,747

The Council for National Policy exists to do just one thing: organize meetings of right-wing operatives, Religious Right leaders and wealthy business interests at posh hotels around the country to share ideas, plot strategy and vet GOP presidential candidates. Membership is by invitation only, and the group seeks no media attention. Despite its small size and shadowy operations, the CNP – founded by Religious Right godfather Tim LaHaye – wields a great deal of influence, showing that even organizations with modest budgets can have a significant impact. U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), after his now-infamous “legitimate rape” comment, showed up at the next CNP meeting to ensure ongoing financial support as he runs for the U.S. Senate. Heritage Foundation Vice President Becky Norton Dunlop currently serves as CNP president, with Phyllis Schlafly and FRC’s Tony Perkins also taking leadership roles.     

--

^...2006 Meeting

An example of the group’s far-reaching influence on the conservative movement in the United States is their May 9, 2006, meeting where speakers included NRA President Sandra Froman, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fuelner Jr., Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, Oliver North and Robert Bork.[4]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-3)

Membership

"The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before of after a meeting," the New York Times reported in August 2004.[3]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-Kirk-2)

Board of directors

The 2002 calendar year Form 990 return filed with the IRS lists the board of Directors as:

Staff members of the Board of Directors are:

Other Members

A copy of the membership roster obtained by Institute for First Amendment Studies, listed current and former members as including:

Other members who list their membership in their biographical profiles include:

Mark Crispin Miller adds the following members:

Addressed the CNP:

Funding

CNP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. For the year ending December 31, 2002, CNP income was $1,240,377.[1]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-Guidestar-0)

According to Media Transparency, between 1995 and 2002 the CNP received $125,000 (unadjusted for inflation) from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation. In 2000 the Castle Rock Foundation paid a membership fee of $10,000.[7]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-6)

The CNP also has a related 501(c)(4) organisation CNP Action Inc.. CNP Action re-imbursed CNP $16,563 for the use of its facilities with and $39,457 of staff time.

Joseph Coors gave start-up funding, according to Washington Babylon (p. 11).

Books mentioning CNP

wiki

Meetings and membership

Marc J. Ambinder of ABC News said about the Council: "The group wants to be the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations." The CNP was founded in 1981. Among its founding members were: Tim LaHaye, then the head of the Moral Majority, Nelson Baker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, William Cies, and Paul Weyrich.[^^4]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-3)

Members of the CNP have included: General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Edwin J. Feulner Jr of the Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, Senator Trent Lott, Senator Don Nickles, former United States Attornies General Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, gun-rights activist Larry Pratt, Col. Oliver North, and philanthropist Else Prince, mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater the private security firm.[^^5]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-opednews.com-4)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-ReferenceA-5)6]

Membership is by invitation only.The membership list, previously made public, is now "strictly confidential." Guests may attend "only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee." Members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name, to protect against leaks.[^^1]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-8-28-04-0) New York Times political writer David D. Kirkpatricksuggested that the secrecy since its founding was intended to insulate the Council from the "liberal bias of the news media".[^^3]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-2-25-07-2)

CNP's meetings are closed to the general public, reportedly to allow for a free-flowing exchange of ideas. The group meets three times per year.[^^7]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-6) This policy is said to be similar to the long-held policy of the Council on Foreign Relations, to which the CNP has at times been compared. CNP's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS in 1992 on grounds that it was not an organization run for the public benefit. The group successfully challenged this ruling in federal court. A quarterly journal aimed at educating the public, promised in the wake of this incident, has not substantially materialized. The group has launched a website (www.policycounsel.org), which contains selected speeches from past gatherings. A controversial 1997 address by the current Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper,[^^8]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-7) is not among them.

While those involved are almost entirely from the United States, their organizations and influence cover the globe, both religiously and politically. Members include corporate executives,[^^9]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-5-20-1981-8) legislators[^^9]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-5-20-1981-8) former high ranking government officers,[^^9]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-5-20-1981-8)leaders of 'think tanks'[^^9]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-5-20-1981-8) dedicated to molding society and those whom many view as "Christian leadership".[^^9]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-NYT-5-20-1981-8)

[edit] Conferences and political plans

Leading members of the CNP voted in a meeting at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, on September 29, 2007, to consider launching a third party candidate if the 2008 Republican nominee is a pro-choice candidate. (This was an implicit reference to Rudy Giuliani, whose liberal opinions on several social issues, such as abortion, gay rights and gun ownership have disturbed the Christian right.) The CNP's statement read, "If the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate, we will consider running a third-party candidate." Attending the meeting were notable social conservatives, including James Dobson, Richard Viguerie, Tony Perkins and Morton Blackwell.[^^10]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-kxmb.com-9)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-10)11]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-10)

CNP members have taken millions of dollars from Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church and the conservative *Washington Times* newspaper, and are aligned with various other groups supported by him such as CAUSA International.[^^12]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-11) Moon's religious message places him as superior to Jesus Christ. Moon was crowned "King of Peace" in a ceremony in the United States Senate Office Building, (not before the actual United States Senate).[^^13]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-12) CNP members have also supported legislation proposed by the Church of Scientology.[^^5]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-opednews.com-4)

CNP also has membership links to the World Anti-Communist League, whose many other members included,among others, the Unification Church and backers of rightist paramilitary death squads in Latin America, particularly during the 1980s.[^^14]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-13)

In 1999, a speech given to the CNP by Republican candidate George W. Bush is credited with helping him gain the support of conservatives in his successful bid for the United States Presidency in 2000. The content of the speech has never been released by the CNP or by Bush.[^^6]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-ReferenceA-5)

As of February 2007, the organization was planning involvement in the 2008 presidential election campaign, and actively looking for a candidate to represent their views. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney[^^15]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-14) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney[^^16]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-15) spoke at a four day conference they held in Salt Lake City, Utah during the last week of September 2007. The Council for National Policy scheduled a conference in late October 2007. Most Republican presidential candidates pledged to appear, with the exception of Rudy Giuliani.[^^10]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-kxmb.com-9)

[edit] Leadership

CNP was founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, author of the *Left Behind* series of books. Other early participants included Cleon Skousen, a prominent theologian and law enforcement expert; Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with the Constitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[^^17]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-16)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-17)18]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-17)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-thefreelibrary.com-18)19]

The council employs about eight people. Its first executive director was Woody Jenkins; later, Morton Blackwell served in this role, which is currently held by Steve Baldwin (b. 1957), not to be confused with actor Stephen Baldwin. Presidents have included Nelson Bunker Hunt of Dallas, Amway co-founder Richard DeVos of Michigan, Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, Paul Pressler of Houston, and former Reagan Cabinet secretaries Ed Meese and Donald Hodel, as well as current president Kenneth Cribb.[^^19]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-thefreelibrary.com-18)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-19)20]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-19)[^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-20)21]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-20) Former Texas state Republican chairman George Strake, Jr., was a member during the 1990s.[^^22]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-21)

[edit] Criticisms

The Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University considers the Council for National Policy a leading force in the Dominionist movement. TheocracyWatch, a CRESP project, describes it as "an umbrella organization of right-wing leaders who gather regularly to plot strategy, share ideas and fund causes and candidates to advance the theocratic agenda."[^^23]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-TheocracyWatchTakingOver-22)

[edit] Limited media access

The media were barred from late September 2007 meetings of the organization. However, *Deseret News* (which is associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) was afforded access to the meeting. The *Salt Lake Tribune* (its competitor) criticized the journalistic ethics of the Deseret News.[^^24]^(https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#cite_note-23)

=

Nonsense beck Cleon Skousen member p 226

invited back to relig convergence period (lds, mormon, southern). Renamed freeman inst praised by RR. orin hatch eulogized

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Viguerie  funding fr, direct mail

map mccain to palin shows lots of overlap

http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?map=2568

Gary Aldrich hunt 283

also hmmn

http://web.archive.org/web/20030608144159/www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-38.htm#P3303_728208

Group Watch: Council for National Policy

See also: Public Eye Website Search

See also: Directory of Right-Wing Groups

GroupWatch: Profiles of U. S. Private Organizations and Churches, was compiled by the Interhemispheric Resource Center, Box 4506, Albuquerque, NM 87196. < http://www.irc-online.org/ > Their work focused on issues related to U. S. foreign policy in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Note that this collection includes a wide range of groups with a variety of political viewpoints. Some, like the Heifer Project, appear to be what they seem-engaged in charitable humanitarian efforts. Check when each article was last updated as much material is no longer current. This material is provided as a source for historic research.

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Council for National Policy

Acronym/Code: CNP

Updated: 9/89

Principals:

The 1982-1983 officers of the Council for National Policy (CNP) were: Thomas F. Ellis, pres; Nelson Bunker Hunt, vice pres, Bob J. Perry sec-tres; Rep. Louis (Woody) Jenkins, exec dir; and Dr. Tim LaHaye, immediate past pres. (1) According to Nelson Bunker Hunt in his deposition in the Iran-Contra hearings, the presidency of the CNP rotates. He has been president, Pat Robertson has been president, and the president at the time of the hearings was Richard DeVos. (2) Hunt also noted that right-wing stalwarts Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips had served on the executive committee. (2)

Woody Jenkins was the original executive director who resigned when the CNP moved from Louisiana to Washington DC. (2) According to the Hunt deposition, Jenkins was succeeded by Margo Carlisle and then Jack Nelson. (2)

The CNP has no members who are not principals. It is a gathering of millionaires that covers a full spectrum of the political right: the New Right, neoconservatives, members of former President Reagan's "kitchen cabinet," and fundamentalist preachers and televangelists. (3) Following is a list of key members of the 1984 board of governors of the NSC along with their principal identifications.

Representing state and national government were: William L. Armstrong, U. S. Senate; Rep. William G. Batchelder III, Ohio House of Representatives; Hon. Bob Billings, White House Liaison Office; Margo Carlisle, staff director of the Senate Republican Conference; Hon. David Copeland, TN House of Representatives; Hon. Braswell D. Deen, Jr. , presiding judge--Court of Appeals of Georgia; Hon. Jeremiah A. Denton, former U. S. Senator; Richard A. Derham, acting asst administrator of the Agency for Intl Development; Hon. Robert K. Dornan, former U. S. Representative; Ambassador H. Eugene Douglas, U. S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs; Hon. John P. East, U. S. Senate (deceased); Hon. Jesse Helms, U. S. Senate; Rep. Louis (Woody) Jenkins, former U. S. Congressman; Hon. Hal Jones, Hawaii House of Representatives; Hon. Jack Kemp, former Senator, current director of Housing and Urban Development; Hon. James A. McClure, U. S. Senate; Hon. Don Nickles, U. S. Senate; Col. Oliver North, deputy director for Political-Military Affairs--Natl Security Council; Hon. B. F. O'Neal, Louisiana House of Representatives; Hon. Paul Pressler, justice of the Texas Court of Appeals; Hon. H. L. Richardson, California Senate; Gary Richardson, U. S. Attorney, Eastern District of Oklahoma; Hon. Don Sebastiani, California Assembly; Hon. Arthur W. Sour, Jr. , Louisiana House of Representatives; Hon. Charles Stenholm, U. S. Congress; Hon. John H. Sununu, former Governor of New Hampshire and current chief adviser to President Bush; Hon. Lewis Arthur Tambs, former ambassador to Costa Rica; and last, but not least in this category, Hon. James G. Watt, former Sec. of the Interior. (4)

From the religious arena the CNP had: Howard Ball, founder and pres of Churches Alive Intl!; William Billings, pres of the Natl Christian Action Coalition; Dr. William R. Bright, founder and chancellor of the Intl Christian Graduate University; Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family; Robert P. Dugan, Natl Assoc. of Evangelicals; Dr. Jerry Falwell, pres of the Moral Majority; Fr. Charles C. Fiore, chairman of the Natl Pro-Life PAC; Peter B. Gemma, Jr. , exec dir of the Natl Pro-Life PAC; Dr. Ronald S. Godwin, exec vice pres of the Moral Majority; Dr. Robert Grant, Christian Voice; Mr. E. Peb Jackson, vice pres of Focus on the Family; Mr. Gary Jarmin, legis dir of the Christian Voice;

Russell Dawmmerling, editor of the Southern Baptist Advocate; Ed McAteer, pres of the Religious Roundtable; Dr. "Pat" Robertson, pres of the Christian Broadcasting Network; James Robison, the James Robison Evangelistic Assoc; and Robert T. Weiner, pres of the Maranatha Campus Ministries. (4)

Representing the New Right and neoconservatives are: Hon. Ben Blackburn, pres of the Southeastern Legal Fdn; Hon. Morton Blackwell, Leadership Insitute; Neal B. Blair, pres of Free the Eagle; L. Francis Bouchey, pres of the Council for InterAmerican Security; Bill Ceverha, natl chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council; Dr. Joseph Churba, pres of the Center for Intl Security; Mrs. Holly Coors, chair of the Colorado State Reagan-Bush Campaign '84; Cullen Davis, vice pres of Kendavis Industries Intl; Richard DeVos, pres of Amway Corp; John T. (Terry) Dolan (deceased), natl chairman of the Natl Conservative Political Action Committee; Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr. , pres of the Heritage Fdn; Ellen Garwood; Alan Gottlieb, chair of Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms; Edith D. Hakola, vice pres and gen counsel for the Natl Right to Work Legal Defense Fdn; Smith Hempston, exec editor of The Washington Times; Robert P. Holding III, natl media dir for the Coalition for Freedom Fdn; Herbert Hunt, pres of Hunt Energy Corp; Nelson Bunker Hunt, chair of the Hunt Energy Corp; Charles L. Irby, vice pres of Irby Construction Co; Reed Irvine, chair of Accuracy in Media; Dr. Mildred Faye Jefferson, pres of Right to Life Crusade; Michael Joyce, exec dir of the John M. Olin Fdn; Dr. Ernest Lefever, pres of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Lewis E. Lehrman, chair of Citizens for America; Connie Marchner, chair of the Natl Pro-Family Coalition; Mrs. Larry McDonald, Western Goals; F. Andy Messing, exec dir of The Natl Defense Council; E. A. Morris; Phil Nicolaides, asst natl editor of The Washington Times; Edward E. Noble, chair of the U. S. Synthetic Fuels Corp; John Norton III, pres of J. R. Norton Co; Ted Pantaleo, exec dir of The Freedom Council; J. A. Parker, pres of The Lincoln Institute for Research and Education; Howard Phillips, chair of The Conservative Caucus; Burton Yale Pines, vice pres of The Heritage Fdn; Lawrence Pratt, exec dir of Gun Owners of America; Raymond V. Raehn, U. S. Global Strategy Council; Carlyle Reed, assoc publisher of The Washington Times Natl Edition; Thomas F. Roeser, vice pres, The Quaker Oats Co; Howard Ruff, publisher of Ruff Times; William A. Rusher, publisher of the National Review; Wiliam E. Saracino, exec dir of Gun Owners of America; Phyllis Schlafly, pres of Eagle Forum; Prof. Hans Sennholz; Frank Shakespeare, vice chair of RKO General, Inc; Mark Skousen, editor of Forecasts & Strategies; Jeffrey St. John, editor of the United States Times; Robert Stoddard; Kathleen Teague, exec dir of the American Legislative Exchange Council; Richard A. Viguerie, pres of The Viguerie Company; Henry (Huck) Walther, exec vice pres of the United States Defense Committee; Paul Weyrich, pres of the Free Congress Fdn; Carter Wrenn, tres of The Natl Congressional Club; and Ronald A. Zumbrun, pres of the Pacific Legal Fdn. (4) J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace Co was on the board of governors as of 1986. (7)

Finally, representing the retired military on the CNP are the well-known figures of Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham (ret. ); Brig. Gen. Albion W. Knight (ret); Maj. Gen. George S. Patton (ret. ); and Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub (ret. ). (4)

Categories:

Political

Background:

According to one source, the CNP was formed in 1981 by Texas millionaires Nelson Bunker Hunt, Herbert Hunt, and T. Cullen Davis. (5) A second source reports that it was formed by Richard Viguerie to rival the Council on Foreign Relations. (8,26) The council is composed of politically powerful, wealthy individuals. It intentionally maintains a very low profile. (3,5) One of the conditions of membership is not to reveal the names of other members or the substance of the group's meetings. (9)

The CNP bills itself as being the Council on Foreign Policy for the Right. (9) But, its importance does not lie in producing and promoting an ultra-conservative foreign policy agenda, many of its affiliates already do that. It is considered by its members as a network that encompasses the entire spectrum of right-wing politics. (3) It provides a "safe" place for representatives of a wide range of ultra-conservative, anticommunist, pro-military organizations--including the executive branch of the White House--to discuss and promote their programs. (3)

Countries:

U. S.

Funding:

Each member of the board of governors must pay a $5,000 entry fee. (3) It is unclear whether this is a one-time entry fee or an annual fee.

The CNP is non-taxable under the IRS 501(c)(3) code. (6) In 1986, it claimed to operate on a budget of $450,000, used for operational and educational purposes. (6)

Activities:

The CNP's only activity is to have meetings. (9)

At the meetings, talks are given by government officials or key figures in current U. S. foreign policy endeavors. (2) Adolfo Calero attended several meetings and spoke to the group about the Nicaraguan contra situation in 1984. (2,3) Col. Oliver North, adviser to the National Security Council and key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, spoke to the group several times before joining it as a member. (2,3)

Those who spoke at the meetings became de facto principal sources of what is known as "inside information. " An example of this was the influence of Oliver North on the CNP. Sidney Blumenthal in an article in the Washington Post National Weekly Edition wrote, "The conservatives' perceptions of the worldwide struggle with communism in general and the Sandinistas in particular were heavily influenced by North who was a favorite speaker. . . "(3)

The meetings are closed and attendees rarely speak publicly about the proceedings. The agenda of a meeting at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs in 1982 was filled with CNP members talking to the "already committed" about their favorite topics--Phyllis Schlafly on traditional values, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub on special operations in El Salvador, Gen. Albion Knight on national defense, and so on. (35) The list of speakers includes most of the major figures of the Right including: Philip Truluck of the Heritage Fdn; Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus; beer baron Joseph Coors; conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan; Frank Shakespeare, chairman of Heritage Fdn; direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie; Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority; the president of Amway Corp, Richard DeVos; Neal Blair, president of Free the Eagle; John (Terry) Dolan, chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, Jeane Kirkpatrick, U. S. delegate to the United Nations; and from the Christian Broadcasting Network, evangelist Pat Robertson. (35)

Government Connections:

Lt. Col. Oliver North was the key figure of the Iran-Contra affair. He was found guilty on three of eight counts brought against him by special prosecuter Lawrence Walsh. His case is now on appeal.

Lewis Tambs has been a consultant to the Natl Security Council. (10) He was first ambassador to Colombia and then Costa Rica in the Reagan administration. (5,10)

In the Kennedy administration, J. Peter Grace was head of the Commerce Department Committee on the Alliance for Progress.

He chaired the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (the Grace Commission) for the Reagan administration. (5)

John Sununu was the governor of New Hampshire and currently serves as chief adviser to President Bush.

Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub served with the office of Strategic Services in World War II, oversaw the CIA operations in Korea during the Korean War, and in Viet Nam commanded the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force. (30,33) He was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra affair and in 1984 was selected by the White House to be the chief private fundraiser for the contras. Singlaub's testimony in the Iran-Contra hearings reveals that he had numerous contacts with Col. Oliver North. (34)

Robert J. Billings was religious adviser to President Reagan. (39)

Margo Carlisle was President Reagan's Asst. Secretary of Defense for legislative affairs. (42)

Frank Shakespeare was a U. S. Information Agency director and a director of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. (13) During the Reagan administration he served as ambassador to Portugal from 1985 to 1987, and then as ambassador to the Vatican. (13)

Private Connections:

Due to space limitations, the list of private connections is abbreviated. The Resource Center has information available on many of the individuals involved with the CNP. Please contact us if you want further information.

J. Peter Grace is a powerful and wealthy international businessman. He heads the W. R. Grace conglomerate. He was a cofounder of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), an affiliate group of the AFL-CIO. (12) AIFLD operates overseas and is funded by the U. S. government. It is considered by many to be a "government operative," and has been linked with the CIA. (5,12) Grace was the chair of AmeriCares, a private organization that works in third world countries, often coordinating its efforts with the Knights of Malta, another group which Grace has chaired. (5,13) The Knights of Malta is an elite, conservative, lay-Catholic organization active in carring out U. S. policy in third world countries. (13) Grace was also on the board of directors of the Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America (PRODEMCA). (14) PRODEMCA was formed to support incipient democratic processes in Central America. It has a controversial history because of its advocacy of the Nicaraguan contras and its involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. (15,16)

Lewis Lehrman was the founder and chairman of the Citizens for America, a lobby group supporting anticommunist resistance groups around the world. (17,36) Lehrman was also a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that developed foreign and domestic policy strategies that were influential in the early years of the Reagan administration. (37) Lehrman is also a member of the Knights of Malta. (13)

"Joseph Coors," wrote Al Weinrub in the Labor Report on Central America, "has used the power of the Coors financial dynasty not only to provide support to the contras, but to set a right-wing political agenda in the U. S. . . "(18) Coors was the chair of the Rocky Mountain region Reagan/Bush campaign in 1984. (19) He provided financial backing for Accuracy in Media, a right-wing media watchdog group. (19) He also supported various groups organized by New Right tactician Paul Weyrich including the Catholic Center, a religious group that sent conservative "truth squads" to counteract the activites of liberal bishops, and the Free Congress Fdn, a group dedicated to electing conservatives to Congress. (20,5) Coors and Weyrich combined efforts again in founding the Heritage Fdn. (5) Coors money has supported right-wing religious groups including the Church

League of America, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Moral Majority, and the Campus Crusade for Christ. (5) Coors supported Lt. Gen. John Singlaub's U. S. Council for World Freedom (USCWF), the U. S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). USCWF and the Nicaraguan Refugee Fund (another Coor's cause) played major roles in funding the Nicaraguan contras. (5) Coors is on the board of trustees of the Heritage Fdn. (22) He was on the advisory council of the National Strategy Information Center, a right-wing think tank for military strategy. (23)

Evangelist Jerry Falwell is the cofounder and head of the recently dissolved Moral Majority. (39) The Moral Majority was a lobbying organization for the right. (39)

Tim LaHaye was head of the American Coalition for Traditional Values and is active in another conservative Christian group, the Christian Voice. LeHaye was also active in the Moral Majority. (21)

Margo Carlisle, when she was an aide to Sen. James McClure (R-ID), was involved in WACL activities and attended the 1980 conference. (29) She is currently a vice pres at the Heritage Fdn. (42)

Howard Phillips is the founder and chair of the Conservative Caucus, a leading right-wing lobby group. (24) He began his political career as an aide to Richard Nixon. (39) He served on the 1988 board of directors of the Citizens for America. (11) Phillips was on the board of the U. S. Council for World Freedom, and on the WACL advisory board. (28,38) Phillips helped Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell establish the religious right organization, the Moral Majority, and was involved in organizing the Religious Roundtable, a coalition of important figures in the religious Right. (39) Phillips is a member of the RAMBO (Restore a More Benevolent Order) coalition, a prointervention, anticommunist coalition whose members include Young Americans for Freedom, College Republicans, Students for America, Freedom's Friends, The Conservative Caucus, Alpha 66, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, Alive and Free, the Natl Young Vietnamese for Freedom, and Nemesis. (43)

Jack Abramoff was chairman of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) in 1985. (38) He went on to chair the USA Fdn, the CRNC's tax-exempt group which had offices at the Heritage Fdn. Abramoff was the executive director of Citizens for America and a close collaborator of Col. Oliver North in the Iran-Contra network. (38) He was the founder and chair of the International Freedom Fdn and currently serves on its board of directors. (38)

Richard Viguerie was the "money-by-mail" king of the New Right. He ran the direct mail campaigns of the Conservative Caucus, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and the National Conservative Political Action Committee. (25) He was on the board of Citizens for America and handled their direct mail campaigns. (27) Viguerie fell into debt and was bailed out by the $10 million sale of his building to the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. (27) Viguerie has joined the board of the American Freedom Coalition (AFC), a Moon-affiliated group that works against anything that threatens "traditional" values. (27) He does the mailings for the AFC as well the UCowned Washington Times newspaper. (42)

Nelson Bunker Hunt is a billionaire patron of the right. He was a member of the John Birch Society Council and part owner of two of their magazines. He was a financial backer of the campaigns of such conservative stalwarts as George Wallace, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Strom Thurmond, and Pat Robertson. Hunt has participated in a number of groups seeking to have the agenda of the Right become the policy of the U. S. , among them the Religious Roundtable, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the National Conservative Policy Advisory Council, and the Institute of American Relations. (40) Hunt was a major funder of Lew Lehrman's Citizens for America. (41)

Frank Shakespeare is chairman of the Heritage Fdn. (13) He was a director of the National Strategy Information Center, a military strategy think tank. (23) He was a member of the SimonNovak commission of the American Catholic Committee that tried to undercut the U. S. bishops' pastoral on the economy. (13)

L. Francis Bouchey is exec vice pres of the Council for Inter-American Security (CIS). (5) CIS is the policymaking group that produced the influential Santa Fe Document, a report used by the Reagan administration in the development of its Central American policies in the early 1980s. (5) Bouchey and CNP members Lewis Tambs and Roger Fontaine were involved in the development of the Santa Fe Document. (5) Bouchey has organized conferences in Latin America for the Unification Church's political arm, CAUSA. (10) He was also commissioned by Moon's World Media Conference in 1981 to prepare and present a "content analysis" of the media coverage of U. S. policy in El Salvador. (10)

Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham was vice chair of the U. S. Council for World Freedom. The USCWF was a major private fundraiser for the Nicaraguan contras. (28,29) Graham is the founder and chairman of the pro-SDI group High Frontier and is a member of the American Freedom Coalition. (29) He also has been heavily involved with the Unification Church's, CAUSA USA. (29) Graham was a member of Team B, a group organized by then-CIA chief, George Bush to develop an independent judgment of Soviet military capabilities and intentions. (30) Graham also headed the ad hoc Emergency Coalition Against Unilateral Disarmament, a promilitary lobby group. (30)

Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub was the founder and chairman of the USCWF. He has served on the boards of Refugee Relief Intl, a subsidiary of Soldier of Fortune; Western Goals, a private information gathering service working to uncover communist sympathizers; the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, and Western Goals in the United Kingdom, a group with the specific task of undermining the radical left. (30,31,32) Singlaub is a member of RAMBO. (43)

Misc:

Although Bunker Hunt in his deposition at the Iran-Contra hearing claimed that the CNP did not ask for donations, Gen. John Singlaub reported that he received commitments for $100,000 from fellow members of the CNP for his funding network for the Nicaraguan contras. (44)

Comments:

The right wing rode the crest of glory and power in the early years of the Reagan administration. The Iran-Contra scandal, coupled with the moral fall of the religious right, have had a devastating effect on its wellbeing. According to investigative reporter, Sidney Blumenthal, the right is bankrupt. (9)

U. S. Address:

Sources:

  1. List of the board of CNP, 1982-1983.
  1. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Apprendix B, Vol 14, 1987.
  1. Sidney Blumenthal, "Oliver North: Mr. Inside for the Contras--and Conservatives," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Dec 29, 1986.
  1. Mailing list for board of governors of CNP, used until

Jan 1, 1985.

  1. New Right Humanitarians (Albuquerque, NM: The Resource Center, 1986).
  1. Alfonso Chardy, "Contras Get Increasing Private Aid," Miami Herald, Jan 21, 1985.
  1. Letter from Paul M. Weyrich, tres of the CNP, Jan 28, 1986.
  1. Letter from Karen Branan, Mar 4, 1986.
  1. Phone interview with Sidney Blumenthal, author and investigative reporter for the Washington Post, Sep 1989. 10. Fred Clarkson, "`Privatizing' the War," Covert Action

Information Bulletin, No. 22, Fall 1984.

  1. Letterhead from Citizens for America, 1988.
  1. Colleen Lowe Morna, "Alleged U. S. Labor Link with CIA and State Dept. Worries Southern Africa's Trade Unions," The

City Sun, May 1-7, 1985.

  1. Penny Lernoux, "Who Knows? The Knights of Malta Know," The National Catholic Reporter, May 5, 1989.
  1. Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America, Annual Report, 1986.
  1. Michael Massing, "Contra Aides," Mother Jones, Oct 1987.
  1. Common Cause Magazine, Mar/Apr 1988.
  1. Washington Post, Dec 29, 1986.
  1. Al Weinrub, "Coors Brews More Than Beer," Labor Report on Central America, Sep/Oct 1985.
  1. Michael Massing, "The Rise and Decline of Accuracy,"

The Nation, Sep 13, 1986.

  1. Penny Lernoux, "A Reverence for Fundamentalism," The Nation, Apr 17, 1989.
  1. Group Research Report, Vol 26, No 10, Dec 1987.
  1. Heritage Foundation, Annual Report 1988.
  1. Special Operations in U. S. Strategy, National Strategy Information Center, 1984.
  1. "Ten Years of Progress, The History of the Conservative Caucus," The Conservative Caucus, 1984.
  1. Nick Kotz, "King Midas of 'The New Right'," The Atlantic, Vol 242, No 5, 1978.
  1. Washington Report on the Hemisphere, COHA, Dec 24, 1986.
  1. Walter Hatch, "Jail Time Was Start of Try for Legitimacy," Seattle Times, Feb 13, 1989.
  1. Listing of officers and board members of the U. S. Council for World Freedom, received Feb 1987.
  1. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated The World Anti-Communist

League (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1986).

  1. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).
  1. Fred Clarkson, "Behind the Supply Lines," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986.
  1. Derrick Knight, "Profile of Western Goals--U. K. ," British Council of Churches, Christian Aid, Nov 1988.
  1. Village Voice, Oct 22, 1985.
  1. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, Vol 25, 1988.
  1. Meeting Agenda, CNP, Colorado Springs, Oct 10-11, 1982.
  1. "All the President's Men," Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Dec 10, 1986.
  1. Jim Luther, "Heritage Foundation Has New U. S. Economic Plan,"

Washington Post, Feb 14, 1985.

  1. David Ivons, "International Freedom Foundation," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1989.
  1. Dr. Peggy Shriver, "The Religious Right: Its Agenda, Influence and Relations with the New Right," CALC Report,

Dec 1986.

  1. Group Research Report, Vol 25, No 7, July/Aug 1986.
  1. Konrad Ege, "The Anticomunist International," The Guardian June 2, 1985.
  1. Group Research Report, Vol 28, No 2, Summer 1989.
  1. Sara Diamond, "Shepherding," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring 1987.
  1. Peter Stone, "Private Groups Step Up Aid," Washington Post, May 3, 1985.

The underlying cites for this profile are now kept at Political Research Associates, (617) 666-5300 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (617) 666-5300      end_of_the_skype_highlighting. http://www.publiceye.org.

GroupWatch: Profiles of U. S. Private Organizations and Churches was compiled by the Interhemispheric Resource Center, Box 4506, Albuquerque, NM 87196. < http://www.irc-online.org/ > See note at top of page.

   

hmmnn

Pat Matrisciana -CNP 1998; Owner and president, Jeremiah Films 22 which has produced over 60 documentaries including Pagan Invasion and No Second Chance; chairman, Citizens for Honest Government which produced The Clinton Chronicles, The Death of Vince Foster: What Really Happened? and Obstruction of Justice; Academy Award nominee.

Citizens for Honest Government Board Member, Carol Steinke, also sits on the board of a Scientology front, Citizens Commission for Human Rights (CCHR).Pat Matrisciana produced a video against 60 Minutes after the latter's expose of Scientology.

Citizens for Honest Government publishes a newsletter, Citizens' Intelligence Digest. It is edited by John Wheeler, Jr., a former editor of The Christian American published by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Contributors to Citizens Intelligence Digest include CNP's William Dannemeyer, Joseph  Farah , Tim LaHaye, Dr. Stanley Monteith M.D., Brad Phillips, (CNP Youth Council), Chuck Missler, Larry Pratt  and Carolyn Steinke. For More on Scientology See: Topic Cults

Found on the Mad Cow website: Inside Richard Mellon Scaife's Conspiracy 23;

Daniel Hopsiker interview of Pat Matrisciana, December, 1998.

......I shot it at him [Matrisciana]: "Are you Agency?"

I meant, of course, was he from the Company. The good Ool bad Ool CIA. But this is, apparently, not considered a polite question, though god knows why not because before he answered he coughed, and looked surprised. Maybe he¹s just not all that used to direct address. But at the end of the meal he said to me that for some reason he¹d told me a lot more than he was planning to, so I guess it was a successful tactic.

"I¹ve been to Berkeley, too," his reply began.

"I was 'detailed' to Berkeley in 1965, to establish a countervailing force to Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement. While there I founded the Campus Crusade for Christ."

And then it was his turn to grin: "I invented," he told me proudly, "Jesus freaks.".....

"I was detailed to Berkeley"

For anyone who has ever suspected, in a dark paranoid moment, that our culture--especially in the 60's--was somehow psycho-managed by the CIA, Matriciana' s offhand admission is enlightening, because it was clear he was in earnest, and I had no reason to doubt that he was telling me the truth. To me, its implications for the current scandal are staggering. Because Matrisciana, when he made the Clinton Chronicles, wasn¹t an independent producer toiling in anonymity. He was an intelligence operative for Richard Mellon Scaife , himself an intelligence operative, with longstanding ties to the Central Intelligence Agency."

from http://www.seekgod.ca/cnp.m.htm#matrisciana

oops pol friendster?

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121170&page=4

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE CONSERVATIVES

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE CONSERVATIVES; Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: August 28, 2004

Three times a year for 23 years, a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country have met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference, the Council for National Policy, to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.

Details are closely guarded.

''The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before of after a meeting,'' a list of rules obtained by The New York Times advises the attendees.

The membership list is ''strictly confidential.'' Guests may attend ''only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.'' In e-mail messages to one another, members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name, to protect against leaks.

This week, before the Republican convention, the members quietly convened in New York, holding their latest meeting almost in plain sight, at the Plaza Hotel, for what a participant called ''a pep rally'' to re-elect President Bush.

Mr. Bush addressed the group in fall 1999 to solicit support for his campaign, stirring a dispute when news of his speech leaked and Democrats demanded he release a tape recording. He did not.

Not long after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld attended a council meeting.

This week, as the Bush campaign seeks to rally Christian conservative leaders to send Republican voters to the polls, several Bush administration and campaign officials were on hand, according to an agenda obtained by The New York Times.

''The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement,'' the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, told the gathering as he accepted its Thomas Jefferson award on Thursday, according to an attendee's notes.

The secrecy that surrounds the meeting and attendees like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and the head of the National Rifle Association, among others, makes it a subject of suspicion, at least in the minds of the few liberals aware of it.

''The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week,'' Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said.

Mr. Lynn was referring to the list of moderate speakers like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York who are scheduled to speak at the convention.

''The C.N.P. members are not going to be visible next week,'' he said. ''But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party.''

A spokesman for the White House, Trent Duffy, said: ''The American people are quite clear and know what the president's agenda is. He talks about it every day in public forums, not to any secret group of conservatives or liberals. And he will be talking about his agenda on national television in less than a week.''

The administration and re-election effort were major focuses of the group's meeting on Thursday and yesterday. Under Secretary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, a spokesman for the State Department said.

Likewise, a spokesman for Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta confirmed that Mr. Acosta had addressed efforts to stop ''human trafficking,'' a major issue among Christian conservatives.

Dr. Frist spoke about supporting Mr. Bush and limiting embryonic stem cell research, two attendees said. Dan Senor, who recently returned from Iraq after working as a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator, was scheduled to provide an update on the situation there.

Among presentations on the elections, an adviser to Mr. Bush's campaign, Ralph Reed, spoke on ''The 2004 Elections: Who Will Win in November?,'' attendees said.

The council was founded in 1981, just as the modern conservative movement began its ascendance. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, an early Christian conservative organizer and the best-selling author of the ''Left Behind'' novels about an apocalyptic Second Coming, was a founder. His partners included Paul Weyrich, another Christian conservative political organizer who also helped found the Heritage Foundation.

They said at the time that they were seeking to create a Christian conservative alternative to what they believed was the liberalism of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A statement of its mission distributed this week said the council's purposes included ''to acquaint our membership with those in positions of leadership in our nation in order that mutual respect be fostered'' and ''to encourage the exchange of information concerning the methodology of working within the system to promote the values and ends sought by individual members.''

Membership costs several thousand dollars a year, a participant said. Its executive director, Steve Baldwin, did not return a phone call.

Over the years, the council has become a staging ground for conservative efforts to make the Republican Party more socially conservative. Ms. Schlafly, who helped build a grass-roots network to fight for socially conservative positions in the party, is a longstanding member.

At times, the council has also seen the party as part of the problem. In 1998, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family spoke at the council to argue that Republicans were taking conservatives for granted. He said he voted for a third-party candidate in 1996.

Opposition to same-sex marriage was a major conference theme. Although conservatives and Bush campaign officials have denied seeking to use state ballot initiatives that oppose same-sex marriage as a tool to bring out conservative voters, the agenda includes a speech on ''Using Conservative Issues in Swing States,'' said Phil Burress, leader of an initiative drive in Ohio, a battleground state.

The membership list this year was a who's who of evangelical Protestant conservatives and their allies, including Dr. Dobson, Mr. Weyrich, Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty; Wayne LaPierre of the National Riffle Association, Richard A. Viguerie of American Target Advertising, Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

Not everyone present was a Bush supporter, however. This year, the council included speeches by Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and Michael A. Peroutka of the ultraconservative Constitution Party. About a quarter of the members attended their speeches, an attendee said.

Nor was the gathering all business. On Wednesday, members had a dinner in the Rainbow Room, where William F. Buckley Jr. of the National Review was a special guest. At 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, members had ''prayer sessions'' in the Rose Room at the hotel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/us/2004-campaign-conservatives-club-most-powerful-gathers-strictest-privacy.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Introduction to The Council for National Policy (CNP) -What It IsJun 27, 2001
July 5/2001Jul 5, 2001
UpdatedFeb 7, 2006
 Revised & Updated       Mar 14, 2008
 Stephen Harper's Speech at the CNP's June 1997 Montreal MeetingMar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy Update > October 15, 2004Oct 15, 2004
CNP's Gary North ~ On the CNPApr 11, 2002
Selected CNP Members Biographies : Name IndexJun 1, 2001
Council for National Policy 1982-1983 Members  Mar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy 1984-1985 Members   Mar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy 1988 Members     Mar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy 1996 Members     revised/updatedMar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy 1998 Members    updatedMar 14, 2008
Council for National Policy 1998 - Tyson's Corner MeetingMar 14, 2008
CNP ExecutivesMar 14, 2008
Selected CNP Joint Organization/Media/Projects  IndexJun 1, 2001
A - DJun 1, 2001
E - J
K - ZJun 1, 2001
Jack Abramoff   UpdatedFeb 8, 2006
Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay CNP ConnectionsFeb 14, 2006
Thomas D. DeLayFeb 14, 2006
CNP Name List By Alphabetical Listing(By Page-click Letter)Jun 1, 2001
**A** --Ambassador S. L.  Abbott ,  Larry Abraham,  Jack Abramoff,  M. Douglas Adkins,  Howard Ahmanson, Jr.,  Dr. Frank  Aker,  Honorable Barbara  Alby , John Alderson,  Gary Aldrich,  Richard V. Allen,  Daniel B. Allison II,  Thomas R. Anderson,  Senator John K. Andrews, Jr.,  Dr. John F. Ankerberg,  Philip F. Anschutz,,  Hon. Richard K. Armey, Ben Armstrong,  Thomas K. Armstrong,  Sen. William L. Armstrong,  Dr. Larry P. Arnn,  John M. Ashbrook, Edward G. Atsinger III        FootnotesAJun 1, 2001
B-- Dr. Theodore Baehr,  Cy Bahakel, Sr,  Carole Baker , Dick Baker,  Terry C. Balderson,  Howard A. Ball,  William H. Ball Jr.,  Dr. David Balsiger,  A. Clifford Barker,  Herbert Barness,  Tommy Barnett,  David H. Barron,  Rep. William G. Batchelder III,  Hon. Gary Bauer    FootnotesBJun 1, 2001
Be--Patricia Beck, John D. Beckett, Melvin Behnke, Jeffrey Bell, Carlos Benitez, Mark A. Benson, Ray Berryman, Paul Bigham, Dr. Robert J Billings, William Billings, Morton Blackwell, Neal B. Blair, James K. Blinn, Thomas A. Bolan, John R. Bolton, Pat Boone, T. J. Bosgra , Richard Bott, Rich Bott, Dr. James C. Bowers, Lynn Francis Bouchey, L. Brent Bozell, III   FootnotesBe
Br  Dr. David W. Breese, Dr. William "Bill" R. Bright, Floyd Brown, Robert K. Brown, Samuel A. Brunelli, Charles H. Brunie, Anita Bryant, Allen Burkett, Larry Burkett, Honorable Dan Burton, Sandra Butler    FootnotesBr
C --Hon. Howard "Bo" Callaway,    Jameson Campaigne, Jr.,   Ken Campbell,   Jim Carden,   Charles S. Carriker,   Margo Carlisle,  Alan Carlson,  John W.  Chalfant,  ,Margaret "Peggy" Cies  Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D   John Commuta     Guy M. Condon   Robert L. Cone   Peter C. Cook   Holland (Holly) Coors   Jeffrey Coors   Joseph Coors   Mrs. Judy M. Cresanta   T. Kenneth Cribb Jr.   Mary C. Crowley   Les Csorba   James C. Czirr      FootnotesCJun 1, 2001
D --Beverly Danielson   Sen. William Dannemeyer   Rt. Rev. Dr. C. Truman Davis   Cullen Davis   Karen Davis   Arnaud de Borchgrave   Don DeFore  Thomas D. DeLay  Rich DeVos   Richard M. DeVos Jr.   James E. DeYoung, Jr.  Richard B. Dingham   Dr. James Dobson   John Dodd   John Doggett  John T. (Terry) Dolan   Elaine Donnelly   Ann Drexel  Arthur M. Dula  Robert P. Dugan   Pierre S. du Pont   Richard Dunham   W. Clark Durant III Alan P. Dye    FootnotesDJun 1, 2001
E --John P. East   Jack Eckerd   Thomas F. Ellis   Stuart Epperson   Michael Etchison   M. Stanton Evans     FootnotesE
 F --Dr. Jerry Falwell,   Joseph F. Farah   Michael P. Farris   Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr   William A. Fields   Father Charles Fiore   Robert Fischer   Peter T. Flaherty   Donald Lambert Folkers   Richard A. Ford   Clarke D. Forsythe   Peter C. Foy   Ann Frazier   Tracy Freeny   Foster S. Friess   Corinne S. Fuller   FootnotesFJun 1, 2001
G --Willard Garvey   Peter B. Gemma Jr.   Kevin Gentry   George F. Gilder   Dr. Duane Gish   Thomas Glessner   Ronald P. Godwin   Stephen Goodrick   Alan Gottlieb   Robbie Gowdey   FootnotesGJun 1, 2001
Gr --J. Peter Grace   Lt. General Daniel O. Graham   Anthony Grampsas   Robert Grant   Jim Groen   Dr. Haldeman 'Hal" W. Guffey   Darryl E. Gustafson  FootnotesGr
H --Rev. Ben Haden   Billy Hale   Colin A. Hanna   Samuel A. Hardage   Sara Divito Hardman    Benjamin Hart   Anthony Harrigan   Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson   H. Preston Hawkins   Richard Headrick   Donna Hearne   Charles C. Heath   Randall Hekman   Jesse Helms   Harry V. Helton   Carl Herbster   Thomas D. Hess   Rev. E.V. Hill   James "Jimmy" Martin Hill Jr.   Joseph K. Hilyard   Roland Hinz   FootnotesHJun 1, 2001
Ho --Hon. Donald Paul Hodel   Rev. Melvin Hodges   William J. "Bill" Hofer   Douglas F. Hofmeister   Gary Hofmeister   Neal Hogan   Lou Holbrook   Robert P. Holding III   George Holland  John Holt  Donald R. Howard  Dr. John A. Howard  Ernest B.  Hueter   Joan Hueter   Max Hugel   Robbie Hughes   Herbert William Hunt   Mary Reilly Hunt   Nelson Bunker Hunt  FootnotesHo
 I-J-K --Reed Irvine   Hon. Ernest J. Istook, Jr.   Lorena Jaeb   E. Peb Jackson   Kay Cole James   Gary Jarmin   Terry J. Jeffers   Dr. Mildred Faye Jefferson   James M. Jenkins    Rep. Louis (Woody) Jenkins   Margaret Jenkins    Willa A. Johnson   Bob Jones III   Rep. Hal Jones   W. Daniel Jordan   Michael Joyce   James F. Justiss   Howard Kaloogian   William Kanaga   Dr. C. L. "Casey" Kay   Barbara Keating -Edh   David Keene   Rep. Jack Kemp   FootnotesIJKJun 1, 2001
 Ken --Dr. D. James Kennedy   William R. Kennedy   Alan Keyes   William A. Keyes   Paul A. Kienel   Cliff Kincaid   Jerry Kirk   Larry Klayman   Brig. General Albion W. Knight  Dr. Robert H. Krieble   FootnotesKen
 L --Beverly LaHaye    Lee LaHaye   Dr. Timothy LaHaye   Reed Larson   Jerome M. Ledzinski   Dr. Ernest W. Lefever   Lewis E. "Lew" Lehrman   John Lenczowski    Andrew W. Lester    Mark R. Levin    Dr. Earl Little   John Lofton   Hon. Trent Lott   Edward Lozick   FootnotesLJun 1, 2001
M~Mca --Mark R. Maddoux   Marlin Maddoux   Marion (Mac) Magruder    Carolyn Malenick   Peter Marshall, Jr.   Connaught (Connie) Marshner   James L. Martin    Christopher "Kit" Mason   Richard Mason    James Mather   Pat Matrisciana    Paul Maurer   Donald S. McAlvany   Ed McAteer    FootnotesMJun 1, 2001
Mc --Thomas E. McCabe  Bryan McCanless  Richard F. McCarthy, Jr   Norman P. McClelland   James A. McClure   Timothy McConville   James D. McCotter   Tidal W. McCoy   Larry P. McDonald   Roy McKasson   Emanuel McLittle   Hon. Edwin Meese III   Major F. Andy Messing, Jr.  Eugene Meyer  Rev. Austin Miles   James C. Miller III   Tom Minnery   Charles W. Missler     FootnotesMc
Mo --Terry E. Moffitt   Barbara Monteith   Dr. Stanley Monteith   Charles Moore  Dr. Raymond Moore   Sam Moore   Thomas Slick Moorman   Dr. Henry M. Morris   Rev. Duane R. Motley   William D. Mounger  FootnotesMo
N~Pa --Senator Don Nickles   David A. Noebel   Grover Norquist   Dr. Gary North   Lt. Col. Oliver North   George D. O'Neill, Jr.   J. Stanley Oakes Jr.   Phillip Olsen   William J. Olson   Ted Pantaleo   J. A. "Jay" Parker   Thomas G. Parker   Colleen G. Parro   G.N. Parrot   Carmen Pate   Dr. Paige Patterson   Maj. General George S. Patton III  FootnotesN-PaJun 1, 2001
Pe~Q --Tony Perkins   Robert J. Perry   Howard Phillips   Thomas L. Phillips   Burton Yale Pines   Robert M. Pittenger   Theda Oates Plimpton   Larry W. Poland   William M. Polk   Robert Poole   Jim Powers   Lawrence D. "Larry" Pratt   Judge Paul  Pressler   Paul Pressler IV   James S. Price   Edgar Prince   Elsa Prince   Coy C. Privette   Penny Pullen   FootnotesPe-Q
R --Raymond V. Raehn   Ralph E. Reed, Jr.   Gerald P. Regier   Thomas L. Rhodes    Dr. Charles E. Rice   H.L. "Bill" Richardson   Richard A. Riddle   Elizabeth Ridenour   Lawson Ridgeway   Stephen D. Ridley   Isom J. Rigell   Dr. Paul Craig Roberts   Dr. "M.G." Pat Robertson   Ronald E. Robinson   James Robison   George C. Roche III   Thomas A. Roe   Kathleen Teague [Rothschild]    Howard J. Ruff   Rev. R. J. Rushdoony   William A. Rusher   FootnotesRJun 1, 2001
S --Guy Sanders, Jr.   William E. Saracino   Richard M. Scaife   Terence Scanlon   Rich Scarborough   Frederic (Rich) Schatz   Blaine Scheideman   Phyllis Schlafly   Otto Scott    John Scribante    Lynda H. Scribante   Alan Sears   Ronald L. Seeley   Harry G. A. Seggerman   Jay A. Sekulow   Duncan Sellars   Hans F. Sennholz   Beurt SerVaas    FootnotesSJun 1, 2001
Sh --Frank Shakespeare   Dal Shealy    Richard Shoff    Terry Siemans   William E. Simon  Major General John K. Singlaub   "Father" Rev. Robert Sirico   Dr. W. Cleon Skousen    Mark Skousen   Baker Armstrong Smith   E. Roy Smith   Henry J. "Bud" Smith  Jim R. Smith  Dr. Lowell Smith  Malcolm E. Smith Jr.    Victor P. Smith   FootnotesSh
Sn --Geraldine (Gerry) Snyder   Thomas R. Spencer, Jr.   LaNeil Wright Spivy   Ted Squires    Scott Stanley, Jr.   Darla St. Martin   Mathew D. Staver, Esq.  Allen Stevens   Donald R. Stewart   Steve Stockman   Robert Stoddard   John Stoos   John A. Stormer   W. Robert Stover  Jay Strack   George W. Strake, Jr   Kathleen Sullivan   Lt. General Gordon Sumner Jr.   John H. Sununu  Gaylord K. Swim   FootnotesSn
T~V --John G. Talcott Jr.   Dr. Lewis Tambs   Hon. Helen Marie Taylor   James "Jim" B. Taylor   Stacy Taylor   Dr. Edward Teller   Robert L. Thoburn   Bill Tierney   Robert G. Tilton   Herbert W. Titus   Steven A.F. Trevino   Patrick A. Trueman   Timothy E. Twardowski    Sherman E. Unkefer III   Rev. Nathaniel A. Urshan    Jon Basil Utley    Harry Valentine   Mike Valerio   Guy Vander Jagt   Balint Vazsonyi   Richard Viguerie   Christine Vollmer   Barbara Vucanovich  FootnotesT-vJun 1, 2001
W --Gray Wakefield    Peter E. Waldron   Robert Walker   Henry L. Walther   James G. Watt   Anthony Wauterlek  Winston O. Weaver  Robert T. Weiner   P. Craig Welch Jr.   Judi Westberg -Warren   Diana Weyrich   Paul Weyrich   Dr. Jack Wheeler   James Whelan  Somers H. White    John W. Whitehead   Faith Ryan Whittlesey   Footnotes WJun 1, 2001

Wi-Z --Rev. Donald Wildmon   Tim Wildmon   Alvin Williams   Dr. John Wilke   James M. Wilson    Thomas S. Winter   Richard B. Wirthlin   George Witwer   Robert Wolgemuth   Robert Wood   Rev. Jim Woodall   Carter Wrenn   Carl Young   Charles B. Young   David Zanotti   Billy Zeoli   FootnotesWi-Z

hmn:

Another important CNP member was Baptist deacon and former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who also championed right-wing fascist Latin American leaders favored and supported by the Fellowship. These included El Salvadorean death squad leaders Roberto d’Aubisson and General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova (now living in South Florida under the protection of Jeb Bush and the right-wing Cuban community), El Salvador’s right-wing President Alfredo Cristiani (in 1990, President George H. W. Bush reportedly held a special prayer with Cristiani and death squad leader d’Aubisson in a side room at the National Prayer Breakfast with Coe officiating), Honduran evangelical Christian death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian dictator Artur da Costa e Silva, Guatemalan dictator and evangelist Efrain Rios Montt (in 2004, Montt’s daughter, Guatemalan Senator Zury Rios Sosa married Fellowship adherent Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL), Guatemala’s evangelist President Jorge Serrano Elias (his George W. Bush-like quote upon election in 1991: “We have won the election with the support of the people and God. I have no commitment to any political power base; my only commitment is to God, to whom I've committed myself to govern the best I can`. . .”); and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (also one of Coe’s friends). The Fellowship had been on very good terms with Panamanian dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega who the first Bush ousted in a 1989 military invasion. Other CNP initiatives included supporting apartheid in South Africa (Jerry Falwell called South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu a “phony” and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club provided a convenient propaganda outlet for South Africa’s apartheid regime) and opposing Corazon Aquino’s attempt to depose Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.   http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-second.html

Wi-Z --Rev. Donald Wildmon   Tim Wildmon   Alvin Williams   Dr. John Wilke   James M. Wilson    Thomas S. Winter   Richard B. Wirthlin   George Witwer   Robert Wolgemuth   Robert Wood   Rev. Jim Woodall   Carter Wrenn   Carl Young   Charles B. Young   David Zanotti   Billy Zeoli   FootnotesWi-Z

hmn:

Another important CNP member was Baptist deacon and former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who also championed right-wing fascist Latin American leaders favored and supported by the Fellowship. These included El Salvadorean death squad leaders Roberto d’Aubisson and General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova (now living in South Florida under the protection of Jeb Bush and the right-wing Cuban community), El Salvador’s right-wing President Alfredo Cristiani (in 1990, President George H. W. Bush reportedly held a special prayer with Cristiani and death squad leader d’Aubisson in a side room at the National Prayer Breakfast with Coe officiating), Honduran evangelical Christian death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian dictator Artur da Costa e Silva, Guatemalan dictator and evangelist Efrain Rios Montt (in 2004, Montt’s daughter, Guatemalan Senator Zury Rios Sosa married Fellowship adherent Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL), Guatemala’s evangelist President Jorge Serrano Elias (his George W. Bush-like quote upon election in 1991: “We have won the election with the support of the people and God. I have no commitment to any political power base; my only commitment is to God, to whom I've committed myself to govern the best I can`. . .”); and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (also one of Coe’s friends). The Fellowship had been on very good terms with Panamanian dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega who the first Bush ousted in a 1989 military invasion. Other CNP initiatives included supporting apartheid in South Africa (Jerry Falwell called South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu a “phony” and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club provided a convenient propaganda outlet for South Africa’s apartheid regime) and opposing Corazon Aquino’s attempt to depose Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.   http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-second.html

Wi-Z --Rev. Donald Wildmon   Tim Wildmon   Alvin Williams   Dr. John Wilke   James M. Wilson    Thomas S. Winter   Richard B. Wirthlin   George Witwer   Robert Wolgemuth   Robert Wood   Rev. Jim Woodall   Carter Wrenn   Carl Young   Charles B. Young   David Zanotti   Billy Zeoli   FootnotesWi-Z

hmn:

Another important CNP member was Baptist deacon and former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who also championed right-wing fascist Latin American leaders favored and supported by the Fellowship. These included El Salvadorean death squad leaders Roberto d’Aubisson and General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova (now living in South Florida under the protection of Jeb Bush and the right-wing Cuban community), El Salvador’s right-wing President Alfredo Cristiani (in 1990, President George H. W. Bush reportedly held a special prayer with Cristiani and death squad leader d’Aubisson in a side room at the National Prayer Breakfast with Coe officiating), Honduran evangelical Christian death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian dictator Artur da Costa e Silva, Guatemalan dictator and evangelist Efrain Rios Montt (in 2004, Montt’s daughter, Guatemalan Senator Zury Rios Sosa married Fellowship adherent Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL), Guatemala’s evangelist President Jorge Serrano Elias (his George W. Bush-like quote upon election in 1991: “We have won the election with the support of the people and God. I have no commitment to any political power base; my only commitment is to God, to whom I've committed myself to govern the best I can`. . .”); and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (also one of Coe’s friends). The Fellowship had been on very good terms with Panamanian dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega who the first Bush ousted in a 1989 military invasion. Other CNP initiatives included supporting apartheid in South Africa (Jerry Falwell called South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu a “phony” and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club provided a convenient propaganda outlet for South Africa’s apartheid regime) and opposing Corazon Aquino’s attempt to depose Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.   http://www.exminister.org/Madsen-Christian-mafia-second.html