Anthony Bouscaren
pratt:<div>
</div><div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Along with his gun work, Pratt was involved during the Reagan years in a wide range of social and foreign policy issues. He was a member of the Council for National Policy, a think tank bringing together leading conservative figures to generate policy for the new administration. In 1980, he founded the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, which<b> raised money for anti-gay campaigns and assisted the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue with legal defenses. I</b>n 1986, during the depths of the AIDS crisis, Pratt bought ads around the country highlighting a D.C. law forbidding health insurance companies from denying coverage and raising rates for people who test positive for HIV. "We don't think AIDS should have civil rights," Pratt told the Los Angeles Times. "The law is a dangerous and outrageous precedent for other wacko legislators to follow. [Those who support it should be] held accountable for voting to support homosexual privileges."</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The following year, Pratt called for the quarantine of people suffering from AIDS. "Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime," he wrote in a Family Foundation fundraising letter. "They've chased God out of our schools, defended abortions…and now they are trying to infect us and kill us with strange and horrible diseases."</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pratt's activities didn't stop at the U.S. border. Throughout the 1980s, Pratt added the last missing element to his extensive portfolio of conservative causes: foreign policy.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pratt did more than support Reagan's arms build-up. He assumed a major role in a global operation assisting in the brutal, sometimes extralegal, execution of Reagan's "full-court press" against leftist forces in Central America and beyond. Under the direction of his friend Pat Buchanan, Pratt served as secretary for the privately run Council for Inter-American Security, or CIS. Ostensibly a think tank advocating an "activist" hemispheric foreign policy, the CIS in fact engaged in propaganda and intelligence gathering in the service of U.S. client states.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Sometimes this made a scramble of Pratt's anti-statist ideology. When it came to the ATF, he saw an American Stasi. But he was happy to help the FBI build files on activists.<b>During Pratt's tenure, the CIS collaborated with the Bureau in tracking undocumented Salvadoran refugees living in the U.S. </b>In his book, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement, Ross Gelbspan documented the joint CIS-FBI effort to identify and deport political refugees back to El Salvador. The Political Asylum Project of the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that of the 154 people sent back between 1983 and 1984, over 100 were either killed or disappeared.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The CIS was part of a larger network of rightwing Cold War groups that launched Pratt well beyond his public orbit of religious conservatives focused on guns, taxes, and abortion.<b> One CIS allied organization was the Unification Church-funded World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a notorious Who's Who federation of neo-Nazis, war criminals, and rightwing terror outfits.</b> A Washington Post reporter who observed the League's 1979 conference counted "former Nazi SS officers, two neo-fascists from Italy reportedly wanted for terrorist acts, [and] members of Alpha 66, a right-wing Cuban exile group." (The reporter didn't know it at the time, but one of the attendees he quoted, Sam Dickson, was a white power activist and Atlanta-based Klan attorney.) <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The chair of WACL's US branch was Roger Pearson, a former Heritage Foundation hire of Pratt's friend Paul Weyrich. After revelations of Pearson's neo-Nazi activities, he stepped down, replaced by Elmore D. Greaves, a former organizer with the segregationist Citizens Councils.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>During the 1980s and early Nineties, it was difficult to look at Pratt's network without tripping over a WACL connection. Pratt was also active in the United States Taxpayers Party, led by WACL member Howard Phillip</b>s. WACL ties carried over into a transitional phase of Pratt's activism: </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His work hyping Hispanic immigration and bilingual education as national security threats. In the mid-Eighties, Pratt launched another organization,<b> English First</b>, as a project within his Family Foundation to wage a racially charged war against bilingual education. He got help from Anthony Bouscaren, a CIS advisor who also sat on the board of WACL. Bouscaren's publishing credits included numerous articles in the<b> neo-Nazi Roger Pearson's Journal for Social, Political and Economic Studies. This didn't stop more than a dozen GOP legislators, including Dick Armey, from joining the board.</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>It was during his involvement in Central American policy and supporting counterinsurgencies around the world that Pratt made multiple trips to Guatemala to observe rural "Civil Defense Patrols." Contemporary human rights observers (and two subsequent Truth Commissions) consider them "death squads" for their role in killing and torturing civilians. But Pratt found much to admire</b>. He combined observations from these visits with similarly impressed notes on the Civilian Home Defense Forces,<b> vigilante patrols in Ferdinand Marcos' Philippines</b>, for a slim book published by the Gun Owners Foundation in 1990, Armed People Victorious. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In it, he praises the leadership of Efrain Rios Montt, </span>the country's military leader during 1982 and 1983 who greatly expanded the civil defense patrols. Twenty years later, Guatemalan judges would find Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. One Amnesty International Report from Montt's tenure detailed massacres in 60 Indian villages over a three-month period, leaving more than 2,500 dead. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As late as 2001, Pratt was publically praising Montt as a "powerful Christian leader." In the concluding chapter of Armed People Victorious, titled "Bringing the Lessons Home," Pratt writes:</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The War on Drugs can be won the same way the guerilla insurgencies were pushed back in Guatemala and the Philippines</b>… The history of the United States for years before and after the founding of the Republic was the history of an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense… While the United States has forgotten its successes in this area, other countries have rediscovered them. It is time that the United States return to reliance on an armed people. There is no acceptable alternative.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Having defeated communism abroad, might not similar tactics work against enemies within? After the election of Bill Clinton, a significant chunk of gun culture would begin wondering the same thing — and about enemies more diverse than drug dealers. Just as he did during the social and foreign policy clashes of the Cold War, Larry Pratt would make sure he was right in the middle of things.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">V. Storms of Fire</div></div>