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Meckler Bak

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FREQ RWW // evang 6 BUT SOME NEGLECT

see satan ~ govt schools

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see convention of states

MICH LOCKDOWN STATEHOUSE PROTEST WOLVERINE PLOT WHITMER?!

merri ok

TP just keeps on giving, eg ron johnson WI wacko and this pow

ideol entre evil pending

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SOME BS ON EPSTEIN 11 25 MMA

07/28/2026 rww

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Kyle Mantyla

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Mark Meckler, Medical Ships, And The MAGA Media Bubble

03/11/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

Mark Meckler is a Christian nationalist political activistand right-wing commentator, the sort who brags about being "a radical, right-wing, Tea Party, Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservative" and praises President Donald Trump for supposedly having rescued the word "retard" from the woke thought police.

Meckler is also the co-founder and president of the Convention of States Foundation, a conservative organization that seeks to get state legislatures to call for an Article V convention to propose constitutional amendments that will dramatically limit the power of the federal government. It was in this capacity that Meckler appeared on his organization's monthly "COS At Home" program last week and demonstrated the perils of living in the MAGA media bubble.

During the program, Meckler and host Jonathan Viaud discussed Trump's ongoing obsession with acquiring Greenland. Meckler praised Trump's efforts to acquire the nation, particularly his decision to deploy a hospital ship to the region.

"There was a really interesting thing that happened recently [that] most people didn't pay attention to in the news," Meckler said. "He sent a mercy ship, a surgical ship to Greenland to provide medical care for Greenlanders, because apparently the medical system there is a disaster and they are not provided that kind of support from Europe. So I think now what he's going to do is use the candy part of the [negotiation]—like we can help you out, we're going to make you guys wealthier, we're going to make you healthier—and ultimately, I think that means he gets to whatever agreement he wants on Greenland.

"Amazing how the mainstream media doesn't cover that type of story," Viaud replied contemptuously. "It's unbelievable."

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Perhaps the reason that people weren't aware of this news is because it never happened. Like so much else with Trump, this was nothing more than a confusing announcement made by the president via social media. The entire idea was completely divorced from reality, rejected by Greenland, and never occurred, as the Wall Street Journal reported:

The Pentagon has received no orders to deploy any U.S. Navy vessels to Greenland, according to U.S. officials, despite President Trump’s claim that a hospital ship is ‘on its way’ to the self-governing Danish territory.

The U.S. has two hospital ships, the East Coast-based USNS Comfort and the West Coast-based USNS Mercy, which are designed as floating medical-treatment facilities. Both vessels are in a shipyard in Mobile, Ala., according to maritime tracking information. The Comfort is undergoing repairs that are expected to be completed in April, while the Mercy is in the middle of a one-year maintenance period that began last July.

The "mainstream media" covered the story extensively, pointing out that the supposed mercy operation was nothing more than a figment of Trump's imagination. But Meckler and Viaud were completely unaware of that because they apparently live in a MAGA media bubble where they can remain insulated from things like facts and reality.

On the Watchlist

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Mark Meckler tells Christian parents to remove their children from public schools: "You are sacrificing your children to Moloch if you leave them in those schools. You are leaving them to the mercy of demons and people who hate the Creator."

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12/09/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

Mark Meckler is a Christian nationalist political activist and right-wing commentator who is the co-founder and president of the Convention of States Foundation, a conservative organization that seeks to get state legislatures to call for an Article V convention to propose constitutional amendments that will dramatically limit the power of the federal government.

In his capacity as president of COS, Meckler hosts a livestream program on Sunday nights called "The Battle Cry" in which he shares his views on contemporary political issues. On the most recent episode of his program, Meckler praised President Donald Trump for calling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz "seriously retarded" in a recent social media post.

"[Walz is] really upset right now because people are calling him, because of President Trump, they're calling him a retard," Meckler said. "So let's talk about this word retard because this has now been made very controversial. There are so many words in the English language that have been driven out of use because we've been told they're politically incorrect. Well, that's just cultural Marxism."

"The word retard, you know what it means, I know what it means, we all know what it means," Meckler continued. "It means somebody who's dumb or lame or ridiculous. What the left, the thought police, the speech police, [what] they're trying to tell you [is] that when we do this, we are insulting people who are mentally handicapped."

Insisting that nobody uses that word to describe people with mental disabilities, Meckler asserted that he's only heard it used to insult "people who are just lame or ridiculous or dumb or doing stupid things or offensive things."

"People say that that's retarded, that person is a retard," Meckler declared. "So this has now come back into common use and I'm actually glad it has because it just shows we're recapturing language from the woke left."

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11/18/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

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08/21/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

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Mark Meckler celebrates Republicans defunding NPR and PBS because they are "anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-religious, anti-traditional values propaganda."

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05/19/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

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Meckler reports that he was "in Washington D.C. meeting with a bunch of folks last week" and is optimistic that "there is an appetite growing" among Republican legislators to support an Article V Convention of States to propose amendments to the Constitution.

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Mark Meckler On How Trump's Inauguration Sent A 'Subtle Message' That Muslims 'Don't Belong Here' | People For

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* Mark Meckler of Convention of States and Rick Green of Patriot Academy and WallBuilders are teaming up for a series of events to explain the “pivotal role the Wild West can play in shaping America’s future.”

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Kyle Mantyla | February 12, 2024 3:23 pm

Mark Meckler is the president of the Convention of States Foundation and a leading proponent of the right-wing movement to get state legislatures to call for a dangerous Article V convention that will consider constitutional amendments to radically alter American government and society by making much of what the federal government now does unconstitutional.

As Right Wing Watch reported last year, Meckler appears to be a fan of Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, so it was no surprise when Meckler appeared on Barton’s “WallBuilders Live” radio program today. The episode turned out to be part of an interview that co-host Rick Green, founder of Patriot Academy, did with Meckler for his own “The Tavern” program last week.

The topic of the interview was immigration and the southern border, which Meckler said can only be properly solved by the government carrying out military strikes within the United States and then invading Mexico and overthrowing its government.

“I don’t think there’s any way to solve this permanently without military action,” Meckler declared. “[We need a buffer zone] like the DMZ between the Koreas. It needs to be a kilometer of cleared territory that is a no man zone; you come in here and we believe you have hostile intent, we’re going to clear you out.”

“That would require military action,” Meckler added. “I think that we ought to acknowledge that the cartels have declared war on the United States of America. Whether they say it or not, in their actions they’ve declared war on us.”

“They control our border,” he continued. “We have to have operational control and the only way to do it is militarily. I think that the federal government ought to go in and make military strikes against the cartels. We know where they are. We know where they’re headquartered. We know where their people are. We need to do it in this country in a mass coordinated fashion because the cartels are well ensconced in this country, pretty much in every major city and most of the minor cities in this country. We need to round them up, throw them in prison, send them back to Mexico.”

“We need to exterminate the cartels and that means going into Mexico,” Meckler asserted. “Now people would say, ‘You’re violating a sovereign country’s territory.’ Well, Mexico is not a sovereign country any longer. Mexico is a failed narco state. The federal government is not in control of their military. The federal government is not in control of their police Their state governments are not, their local governments are not in control of their police forces. That is a failed narco-terrorist state and so we have to treat it as such.”

“Let’s clean out the cartels,” he said. “Let’s do what has to be done. Prop up a government that is actually a government that is going to be friendly the United States and is going to continue to work with us to limit cartel activity in Mexico. If we don’t do that, we’re gonna have a terrorist state—which we have right now on our border—forever. To me, this is like Gaza. They’re invading our country. They’re invading our country every day. They’re killing our people, and we have to go in and use maximum force to oust them and create a buffer zone along the border. If we do that, we’ll have border security. It’s that simple.”

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virginia Is Trending Blue, So Mark Meckler Wants It Split In Two

By Kyle Mantyla | November 13, 2023 2:59 pm

After Democrats took control of the Virginia state legislature in last week’s election, right-wing activist Mark Meckler suggested that the state should be broken in two.

Meckler is the president of the Convention of States Foundation and a leading proponent of the right-wing movement to get state legislatures to call for a dangerous Article V convention in order to “reverse 115 years of progressivism.”

DuringSunday night’s episode of his “The BattleCry” program, Meckler complained that Virginia has been trending Democratic in recent elections because “Washington DC is spilling out all over northern Virginia.”

“That’s a very Democrat area and that is where the population base is that dominates the state,” Meckler said. “If you want my opinion, Virginia should be split into two states. Culturally, geographically, politically, it’s really north Virginia and south Virginia, and I would feel way more at home in South Virginia.”

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It is worth noting that Rep. Mike Johnson, who was recently elected Speaker of the House, “has long been a supporter of Convention of States,” according to Meckler. In fact, Meckler’s organization recently launched “a special letter-writing campaign to express our heartfelt gratitude to the newly appointed Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, for his unwavering support of the Convention of States Resolution and Article V.”

Convention of States even provided sample letters that can be mail to Johnson:

Letter 1:

Dear Speaker Johnson,

I’m writing to express my heartfelt gratitude for your unwavering support of the Convention of States Resolution and Article V during your time in the Louisiana legislature. Your dedication to upholding the principles of limited government and state sovereignty is commendable.

As you transition into your new role as the Speaker of the House, I want you to know that my thoughts and prayers are with you and your team. I understand the tremendous responsibility that comes with this crucial public service position, and I am confident that your leadership will make a positive impact on our great nation.

Thank you for your service, and may you find strength and wisdom in your new role.

Sincerely,

[Your Signature]

Letter 2:

Dear Speaker Johnson,

My name is XXX and I’m from XXX. As a dedicated grassroots volunteer with Convention of States, I want to extend my appreciation for your strong support of the COS Resolution and Article V. It’s promising to know that the leader of the House is truly committed to fiscal responsiblity and limited government, especially during these challenging times.

Please know that the Convention of States grassroots are praying for you, your family, and your staff as you all transition into new roles. We believe that your leadership, grounded in faith and constitutional principles, is invaluable to the future of our nation.

These letters of appreciation are a small token of our collective support. I have full confidence that under your leadership, our country will begin to move in a positive direction.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Your Signature]

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see tucker 4 anno

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-embraces-fringe-convention-states-movement

Carlson embraces fringe Convention of States movement

01/19/23

no lnx vid

ox News’ Tucker Carlson embraced a fringe idea for amending the Constitution known as the Convention of States, joining a growing list of right-wing media personalities who have been supportive of the movement.

Carlson’s comments came during an hour-long interview with former Tea Party activist and Convention of States Action president Mark Meckler, on Fox Nation’s streaming subscriber-only show Tucker Carlson Today. Meckler and his organization are the driving force behind the movement, which seeks to advance a far-right agenda by bypassing the traditional processes for amending the Constitution.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times, always by securing two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress as a first step. Article V of the Constitution provides for another option, though, in which two-thirds of state legislatures call for a convention to consider and put forward amendments. In both cases, any proposed amendment would then need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Meckler and his organization want to use the second, never-before-used method as a way of fundamentally transforming the federal government.

In theory, any kind of amendment could come out of a convention like the one envisioned by Meckler. In practice, virtually everybody pushing for this unlikely process are right-wing activists with a conservative agenda aimed at limiting progressive elements of the federal government. In that way, the push for a convention of states resembles rhetoric around states’ rights – nominally colorblind rhetoric that is in fact deeply hostile to civil rights and other progressive issues. The Convention of States Project’s parent organization, Citizens for Self-Governance, for example, donated $10,000 to America First Legal, an anti-civil rights legal group headed by former Trump adviser and white nationalist Stephen Miller.

What Meckler was proposing would elevate “the voice of ordinary people,” Carlson said. “It's a much more small d-democratic way of governance.” Over the course of the interview, he treated opposition to the idea – whether from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) or the Sierra Club – as absurd on its face, and an example of bad faith or faulty reasoning.

“I think anybody who's watched the last hour is certainly impressed by the way you've thought about this,” Carlson said near the end of the interview. “I personally am for it, thanks to you.”

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Citation From the January 17, 2023, edition of Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Today

Most of Meckler’s policy proposals are boilerplate conservatism collected under the umbrella of so-called smaller government. But in the conversation with Carlson, he also espoused the much stranger view that direct election of U.S. senators – the law of the land thanks to the 17th amendment – was a mistake.

Meckler explained that “the 17th Amendment whereby we decided to directly elect senators instead of having them appointed by the states” was partly responsible for breaking the “structure” that the Constitution’s framers had envisioned.

“When we started electing senators, senators get their power from D.C.,” Meckler said later in the interview. “Prior to the 17th Amendment, senators are appointed by state legislatures, and that means the power of the Senate is in the states. And once they're elected, now their power base is in D.C., they serve their D.C. masters.”

Meckler isn’t the only conservative attempting to radically shift power towards state legislatures. A group of MAGA and Trump-aligned lawyers, including top coup architect John Eastman, have advanced an intellectually dubious doctrine called the independent state legislature theory, which would “give state legislatures wide authority to gerrymander electoral maps and pass voter suppression laws” according to the Brennan Center, a think tank that advocates for expanding voting rights.

Carlson joins right-wing media figures like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fox News’ Mark Levin, who have also promoted Meckler’s movement. After speaking with Meckler in September, Bannon closed the interview by saying, “Taking down the administrative state; got to hit it from every angle.” Bannon has been pushing that line since at least 2017, when he told the audience at CPAC that his goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Levin has been a supporter of the idea since at least 2013, when he published a book called The Liberty Amendments, which proposed a lot of the same ideas Meckler has put forward and coincided with the launch of his group. Several conservative pundits and politicians subsequently signed on to the idea as well, including Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, as well as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Meckler is deeply embedded in the conservative movement. He spoke at a transphobic rally last October that was attended by white supremacists and Proud Boys, as reported by LGBTQ Nation. Just months earlier, he was at CPAC – of which Convention of States Actions was a sponsor – fantasizing about which federal agencies to abolish. “How about we get rid of the Department of Education?” Meckler asked the audience, as reported in The New Republic. “How about we get rid of the EPA?”

Balanced budget, term limits, and the return of states' rights

Meckler’s goals extend beyond destroying federal agencies, though that is a central tenet of his philosophy. In his conversation with Carlson, Meckler expounded what he believed the top priorities of a convention of states should be.

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Citation From the January 17, 2023, edition of Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Today

“The first subject is anything that would impose fiscal restraints on the federal government,” Meckler said. “So I mentioned a balanced budget amendment, things like tax caps, spending caps maybe tied to population plus inflation.”

Conservatives frequently talk about the need for a balanced budget amendment, usually based on the faulty analogy that the federal government operates like a family budget. Indeed, research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, shows that a balanced budget amendment could be disastrous for the country, threatening Social Security and other welfare programs. But for conservative activists like Meckler, weakening the social safety net through austerity politics is likely a feature, not a bug, of the proposal.

“Second is anything that would impose term limits,” Meckler continued. Crucially, he doesn’t only want to impose term limits on elected officials and Supreme Court justices, but also on career civil servants. “How about on the bureaucracy, on the deep state, on staffers?” he asked. “These are the people really running Washington, D.C., and they shouldn't be there for 30 years. It was never intended to be a permanent career for people.”

“And that would prevent a Fauci from happening?” Carlson asked later, referencing Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Absolutely,” Meckler responded.

Term limits for Congress is an increasingly popular idea on the right that some liberals, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), have also embraced. The case for term-limiting Supreme Court justices is far stronger than for imposing them on Congress, which risks further empowering lobbyists and accelerating the revolving door between public and private sector influence. There is considerable political science research that shows terms limits for Congress would likely exacerbate many of the problems the policy seeks to solve.

Meckler’s suggestion that career staffers should be barred from public service after a set amount of years is far more radical, but fits entirely inside the broader conservative goal of weakening progressive elements of the federal government. What Meckler is pushing here is just an updated version of Grover Norquists’s goal of making government small enough to “drown it in a bathtub,” or Bannon’s obsession with destroying the administrative state.

The effect of forcing out long-serving public employees would almost certainly shift even more power to the private sector, as elected officials and their staffs would be forced to outsource institutional knowledge to outside lobbying firms and think tanks. Like many conservative activists, Meckler offers lip service to decry the influence of lobbyists, but has deep ties to the Koch brothers, the Mercer family, and other major financiers on the right.

Carlson and Meckler’s singling out of Fauci, who right-wing media have chosen as the avatar of pandemic policies they oppose, echoes a recent moment from an episode of Bannon’s War Room podcast, guest hosted by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Gaetz and 19 other hardliners blocked Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) bid for Speaker of the House until he offered concessions to the far-right faction, including reinstating something called the Holman Rule. That provision would allow any member to target the funding of any individual civil servant.

“If we'd have had this tool, we would have obviously directed it at Anthony Fauci,” Gaetz told Russ Vought, of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank closely aligned with former President Donald Trump.

Meckler’s third and final stated goal for a potential convention is to pass “anything that would impose scope and jurisdiction restraints on the federal government,” he said. “And what that means fundamentally is going back to something like the enumerated powers.” He added later that the federal government  was “never supposed to be involved in education or energy or health care or food production, agriculture, all of this stuff.”

There are two complementary ways to understand this proposal. At its most basic level, Meckler is channeling some sort of libertarian instinct here, with all of the obvious flaws that come with that political philosophy. Underneath that surface-level rhetoric is a more pernicious return to the rhetoric of states rights, a racist dog whistle that for decades allowed conservatives to mask their opposition to civil rights and progressive government policies as a principled small government philosophy.

There are very real criticisms to be made of the U.S. Constitution, which has many counter-majoritarian aspects built into it. There’s a strong case to be made that the Constitution is actually an impediment to building a more progressive, just, and small-d democratic society. That’s not what Meckler and his movement are about. The vision of the country they’re putting forward is a regressive one, oriented around states’ rights and all the racist implications that come with it

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last Friday, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh held a rally in Tennessee against gender-affirming care, a follow-up to his targeted misinformation campaign against Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. Footage from the rally, which included speeches from Walsh, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and other media figures and local politicians, shows that it attracted a cadre of extremists, including members of the violent Proud Boys extremist group and multiple protesters brandishing signs explicitly calling for violence against medical professionals. Following the rally, Walsh called the protesters “normal decent Americans” while Blackburn said she was “proud” to have participated.

Walsh, an opportunist who has committed himself to an anti-trans crusade, recently claimed to be “building a nationwide organized movement” to target hospitals and medical providers with harassment after helping to drive harassment against Boston Children’s Hospital. After the facility reported threats against doctors and staff, Walsh continued to target the facility, which later received more than one bomb threat. In September, Walsh targeted Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital with similar false claims and mischaracterizations of procedures offered to minors, falsely claiming the hospital would “castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors as well as adults.”

The efficacy of gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and the serious psychological risks of denying that care, have been shown by numerous studies, and such care is supported by every major medical organization in America.

Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital responded to Walsh by saying it did not provide gender-affirming genital surgeries for trans youth but would temporarily cease other gender-affirming surgeries for minors, despite such surgeries having very low rates of regret. Following the success of his targeting of Vanderbilt, Walsh announced the rally at the Tennessee state capitol on October 21, which was billed as “The Rally to End Child Mutilation.”

Walsh’s rally attracted extremists, some of whom explicitly called for violence against medical professionals

Leading up to the rally, Walsh, who has a history of promoting or defending political violence, continually targeting healthcare providers and the LGBTQ community, comparing doctors who provide gender-affirming care toNazis, calling for police to “[break] down the doors” of establishments hosting drag events, and tweeting he was “not just reporting” on the trans health clinic at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital but was “going to put a stop to it.”

Footage of the rally streamed by Walsh and local news outlets on YouTube showedmultiple attendees at Walsh’s rally directly calling for violence against doctors, with one attendee’s sign reading “Doctors who mutilate children should be killed.”

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the sign was visible at the front of the crowd for the duration of the rally, including during speeches by Walsh and Blackburn. The man holding the sign, who can be seen cheering for Matt Walsh during a speech by Tea Party activist Matt Meckler, was also recorded by local media confronting counter-protesters before the rally yelling, “No mutilators, mutilators go home.” 

Footage from alocal newscast of the event also captured an attendee positioned further back in the crowd holding a sign that said, “mutilate the mutilators.”

Following the bomb threat made against Boston Children’s Hospital, Walsh claimed that “no critic of gender ideology gains anything or has any incentive to make a threat.”

Footage from the rally also shows a number of members of the violent extremist group the Proud Boys, one of whom can be seen flashing a white nationalist hand signal as he passed counter protesters.

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the rally also attracted fringe Christian fundamentalists who held oversized signs declaring, “homo sex is sin,” and that “hellfire awaits” gay people and “baby killers.” Another protester near the front can be seen holding a sign declaring, “We are at war,” with the other side reading, “No justice, no peace, free the J6’ers,” referring to those arrested for participating in the January 6 insurrection.

Walsh and other speakers at the rally used incendiary language directing anger at medical professionals 

In addition to Walsh, speakers at the rally included GOP state politicians from Tennessee, who earlier this year passed multiple anti-trans bills (helping to perpetuate mental health crisis among trans youth in the state), and Blackburn, who used the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to push anti-trans talking points. Other speakers included Tulsi Gabbard,Dr. Colin Wright, and Chloe Cole.

During the rally, Walsh engaged the crowd with incendiary language, asking the audience, “As Tennesseans, do we believe in castrating children? Do we believe in that? Do we believe in drugging and mutilating kids?” Walsh added, “They believe in it.” He continued, saying, “I'm not going to leave it to my kids to fight this fight. We don't leave it to our kids. We stand up and we fight. It isn't our kids’ battle,” before going on to characterize his “fight” as “a battle of good versus evil.”

In her speech, Blackburn directed the attention of the extremists in the crowd to Vanderbilt, saying Walsh and the Daily Wire did an “amazing job” targeting Vanderbilt, referencing “what was taking place just down the street right here in Nashville.” Later in her speech, Blackburn said she was going to “carry this movement to take care of our children, to end this child mutilation.” As she neared the end of her speech, Blackburn said, “Look, you all arehappy warrior freedom fighters, and you are not going to let the left get their way with our children.”

Vanderbilt’s proximity to the crowd’s location was also referenced by State Rep. William Lamberth (R-TN), who said during his speech, “If not for Matt and his team, a certain university medical center just down the road would still be performing child mutilation surgeries.”

Walsh and other speakers reacted to the rally by targeting counter protesters and lauding the anti-trans protesters 

Immediately following the rally, Walsh, who last year called Kyle Rittenhouse a “victim” after Rittenhouse shot dead multiple people at a Black Lives Matter protest, tweeted a photo of the crowd where the sign calling for violence against doctors is visible, with Walsh simply captioning it, “We are winning.”

Blackburn tweeted after the rally that she was “proud to defend Tennessee kids from these dangerous procedures today.” Tulsi Gabbard wrote in her newly-launched Substack newsletter that there were “a handful of very noisy protesters who were there to support continued child mutilation” at the rally, but made no mention of those calling to murder doctors.

During his podcast on Monday, Walsh targeted the counter protesters at the event, calling them “satanic leftist zombies'' and “emotionally disturbed freaks and losers,” and claimed some of them were “of the paid variety.” Walsh contrasted them with his supporters.

In the end I have to be grateful that thedisgusting hellspawnsdid show up because it provided exactly the kind of contrast that I want people to see. On one hand, you have normal decent Americans of all ages and demographics speaking out against one of the great atrocities of our time, and on the other hand you have a bunch of screeching goblins who have no argument to present, no point to make, and are only interested in silencing the other side by whatever means necessary.So it's just up to each member of the public to decide whose side they want to be on. You see that footage, you decide, who do you want to line up with?

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a movement among far-right MAGA Republicans and Tea Party members is hoping that if enough state legislatures get on board, there will be a constitutional convention — one that would rewrite the U.S. Constitution and give it a MAGA makeover. And the movement, according to The Guardian, has a major ally in Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast, former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration and former executive chairman at Breitbart News.

Journalist Ed Pilkington, in an article published by The Guardian on October 19, reports, “Bannon has devoted recent episodes of his online show ‘The War Room’ to a well-funded operation which has stealthily gained ground over the past two years. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate interests, it aims to persuade state legislatures to call a constitutional convention in the hope of baking far-right conservative values into the supreme law of the land. The goal is, in essence, to turn the country into a permanent conservative nation irrespective of the will of the American people.”

Pilkington notes that the constitutional convention that MAGA Republicans have in mind “would promote policies that would limit the size and scope of the federal government, set ceilings on or even abolish taxes, free corporations from regulations, and impose restrictions on government action in areas such as abortion, guns and immigration.”

READ MORE: A far-right movement to 'rewrite the Constitution' has 'immense potential for lasting harm': historian

In September, Bannon told “War Room” listeners, “This is another line of attack strategically. You now have a political movement that understands we need to go after the administrative state.” And Pilkington explains what Bannon means by “administrative state.”

“By ‘administrative state,’ Bannon was referring to the involvement of the federal government and Congress in central aspects of modern American life,” Pilkington observes. “That includes combating the climate crisis, setting educational standards and fighting health inequities.”

One of the Tea Party activists who is hoping for a constitutional convention is Mark Meckler, founder of Convention of States Action(COSA). During a “War Room” appearance, Meckler told Bannon, “We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’…. The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat — or radical progressive, or Marxist, which is what they are — we are going to lose the gains. So, you do the structural fix.”

Pilkington points out that “by cementing the policies into the U.S. Constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge.” The journalist outlines two ways in which the U.S. Constitution, under Article V, “can be revised.”

READ MORE: 19 states have joined a new right-wing effort to remake the Constitution with their fringe ideas

“In practice, all 27 amendments that have been added over the past 244 years have come through the first route: a Congress-led process whereby two-thirds of both the U.S. House and Senate have to approve changes followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states,” the journalist explains. “Meckler, working alongside other powerful interest groups and wealthy right-wing megadonors, is gunning for Article V’s second route — one that has never been tried before. It gives state legislatures the power to call a constitutional convention of their own, should two-thirds of all 50 states agree. The state-based model for rewriting the U.S. Constitution is perhaps the most audacious attempt yet by hard-right Republicans to secure what amounts to conservative minority rule in which a minority of lawmakers representing less-populated rural states dictate terms to the majority of Americans.”

Former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold is warning that the efforts of groups like COSA need to be taken seriously. Along with Peter Prindiville of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. Feingold addresses this threat in their book “The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It.”

Feingold told The Guardian, “Our goal is not to scare people, but to alert them that there is a movement on the far right that is quietly getting itself to a point where it will be almost impossible to stop a convention being called.”

READ MORE: 'Today’s Republicans are fascist': Conservative activist slams authoritarian GOP candidates

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https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7

simulation: COSAction (conventionofstates.com)

vids:

We know you are anxious to see the complete results, and we appreciate your patience. As an independent assembly, the statement about the final results from the Convention must come from the body, and not our organization. We will circulate it on behalf of the Convention.

Here's a quick preview. The Convention passed amendment proposals on the following six ideas:

  1. The public debt shall not be increased except upon a recorded vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress.
  2. Term limits on Congress
  3. Limiting federal overreach by returning the Commerce Clause to its original meaning
  4. Limiting the power of federal regulations by giving an easy congressional override
  5. Require a super majority for federal taxes and repeal the 16th Amendment [fed income tax?]
  6. Give the states (by a 3/5ths vote) the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation or executive order.

The events at Williamsburg will be remembered as a turning point in history. The spirit of liberty and self government has been reignited." Michael Farris - Co-Founder, Convention of States Project.

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not complete but most links

biz insider

common cause : ConCon-Opposition-Letter-March-2019.pdf (commoncause.org)

A convention is gaining momentum but still far away

So far, 19 GOP-controlled states, including four in 2022 alone (Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), have passed applications and calls for a constitutional convention under the model pushed by the conservative nonprofit group Convention of States, an offshoot of Citizens for Self Governance.

because of their efforts, "it's the first time any of these applications have had this much movement in quite some time," Viki Harrison, director of Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent Programs at Common Cause, told Insider. She called the passage of four new convention calls in states including South Carolina "a brutal loss."

Citizens for Self Governance and Convention of States, led by former Tea Party activist and ex-Parler CEO Mark Meckler, are relatively newer and well-funded players on the scene with connections to wealthy and powerful conservative interests.

Tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal the groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, have received millions from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust, the Mercer family, and groups linked to powerful conservative lawyer Leonard Leo. A 2020 internal audit of Convention of States obtained by the group revealed that a $1.3 million donation made in Bitcoin made up 16% of the group's budget in 2019. Two donations totaling $2.5 million accounted for 36% of the group's 2020 budget....

so does Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a staunch Trump defender who wrote an entire book, "The Con of the Con-Con," about the dangers of conventions.

"In states where you would have expected this to pass because they have Republican leadership, they're firmly on our side because they're scared about losing guns," Harrison said.

Natelson, who has published numerous writings and academic articles on Article V, charged that people who fear a runaway convention "don't know what they're talking about" and GOP legislatures that have resisted calling a convention out of those worries "have been sold a bill of goods."

"Those academics who go before the legislature and say things like, 'we don't know anything about the process, it could be a runaway convention' without exception, are people who have never published any scholarship on the subject," he said....

at the Convention of the States' 2016 mock convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, delegates, including Eastman, voted out six amendments, including a proposal that would eviscerate the 16th Amendment, which grants Congress the ability to impose an income tax.

The resolution the group is pushing would limit a convention to amendments that "impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress."

But limiting "the power and jurisdiction" of the federal government is an expansive mandate that could encompass virtually anything and enable delegates to pass extreme amendments while technically staying within the bounds of the convention....

Recent blog posts on the Convention of States' website explicitly reference the need for a convention to limit federal overreach on abortion, guns, and immigration.

"The Supreme Court has said that amending the Constitution is a political question in which the federal courts cannot get involved," Super said. "The president has no role at all in the process. And the whole point of the convention route is to sideline Congress. So Congress can't overrule the convention … there's no one to intervene. There's no one to stop a convention from doing whatever they want to do."

States have the flexibility to caveat their calls for a convention, and some have included penalties to keep delegates in line. Indiana and Florida have even made it a felony for convention delegates to defy the legislature's intent, measures they passed alongside their pro-convention resolutions....

Behind closed doors, Meckler, Santorum, and Natelson pitched a convention to GOP lawmakers gathered at a December 2021 ALEC workshop as a way for ordinary citizens to force sweeping changes to every facet of government.

"We would be aiming at the Deep State and potentially the federal judiciary as well," Meckler told lawmakers in the closed-door session, a recording of which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. ...

moments later, Meckler said his effort could be judged by its "enemies," railing against a slew of "leftist" advocacy groups who oppose a convention.

"It's every leftist group in America, radical leftist group in America that stands for, I would argue, the destruction of America, the destruction of babies in the womb, the destruction of life itself," he said. "They hate America, they want to destroy America, and they're against Convention of States."

Santorum also assured lawmakers that conservative interests would be strongly represented in a one-vote-per-state convention due to the outsize influence of lower-population states, saying, "we have the opportunity, as a result of that, to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with."....

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influencewatch tp action:

...

Capitol Riots Controversy

In January 2021, TPP was listed as one of the groups supporting the March to Save America, a rally on January 6 to protest the certification of the 2020 presidential election results by Congress. TPP leaders were outspoken after the election, claiming without substantiation that there had been widespread fraud and that the election results should be overturned in favor of then-President Donald Trump. [49] After rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol building following the rally, critics blamed TPP and other sponsors of the peaceful march for subsequent rioting. [50]

TPP officials denied funding the rally and immediately denounced the violence which followed it. Despite its denunciation, left-of-center critics accused the organization of promoting “conspiracy theories of voter fraud and a ‘deep state,’” claiming that those theories inspired “predictable” violence at the Capitol. The left-of-center Washington Postwent so far as to publish a letter to the editor which called on the IRS to “take action” against TPP for “the safety of our nation and its citizens.” [51]

Financial Management Controversies

In 2011, the far-left magazineMother Jonespublished a three-part expose on TPP’s financial management practices, alleging that the organization refused to publicly disclose its financial information and silenced supporters who asked for such records. [52]

The expose criticized TPP for not filing the required tax Form 990s prior to receiving official tax-exempt status from the IRS, despite the fact that TPP broke no laws in failing to do so. Other right-of-center figures and even some TPP supporters criticized the move, accusing the organization of hypocrisy for demanding financial transparency in government while keeping its own financial information private. [53] TPP also received criticism for the amount of money it spent on consultants and fundraising events, with some supporters claiming to be upset that the money was not instead used for grassroots initiatives. [54]

TPP faced further criticism for its executive compensation, allowing its executive officers to fly in private planes and treat themselves to expensive hotel stays and meals while on work trips. Former TPP supporters criticized the organization for treating its executives “like kings and queens on donated money.” One former TPP supporter who criticized TPP fundraising practices claimed she was threatened by a lawsuit if she spoke publicly about the organization, while others claimed they were forced out when they questioned the group’s finances. [55]

The controversy continued following the launch of the TPP Citizens Fund, which spent nearly $2 million on fundraising, polling, and consultants in the first three months of 2014 and only $56,000 on candidate expenditures. At the same time, the PAC was paying Martin a $15,000 monthly consulting fee, in addition to her $272,000 salary from TPP Action. [56]

People and Funding

Tea Party Patriots was founded by Jenny Beth Martin, Mark Meckler, and Amy Kremer. Martin and Kremer have been called the “founding mothers” of the Tea Party movement for their involvement in founding TPP, though Kremer has since split off from TPP and become a prominent supporter of former President Trump. [57]

Martin worked in politics for most of her life, working as a Republican consultant and for former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) before founding TPP. Martin founded TPP after struggling under more than $1.4 million in tax debt and becoming frustrated with American fiscal policy following the Wall Street bailouts. [58] [59] In 2010, Time named Martin one of its 100 most influential people in the world for her work with TPP. [60]

Meckler worked with TPP for several years before becoming interim CEO of the conservative social media platform Parler in February 2021. [61] Meckler is also president of Citizens for Self-Governance, another right-of-center organization which advocates against government regulations, and the co-founder of Convention of States Action, an organization which calls for the states to call a convention to amend the Constitution directly in order to limit the size and power of the federal government. [62] [63]

TPP has received funding from prominent right-of-center donors and organizations in the country. The organization has received $103,000 from DonorsTrust, $100,000 from the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, and $150,000 from late billionaire Republican donor Sanford Diller. [64] The TPP Citizens Fund has received over $4.3 million from Republican donor Richard “Dick” Uihlein.[65]

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David Koch died in August 2019, but his brother Charles carried on. A man with no particular religious profile, Koch embarked on a “charm offensive,” distancing himself from Trump and his fundamentalist allies, presenting himself to the media as a “unifier” (and scrubbing the CNP’s Free Enterprise Award from his profile). But his funding activities told a different story. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Alec Kotch has recorded millions of dollars in grants from Koch and affiliates such as the Donors Trust to organizations run by leading members of the CNP. Theseinclude ALEC, as well as the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA. Some of these groups would play important roles in attempts to disrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.

The Washington Post’s April story on the “100 business leaders” initiative made no mention of the CNP, despite the fact that among the leading figures, Moore was on the CNP board of governors, Nelson was a member, and Martin and Brandon were officers. Moore warned the Post that the disaffection of “the right” presented a growing threat to public order, neglecting to mention the ways the CNP was stoking the flames. “There’s a massive movement on the right now, growing exponentially,” he said. “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets by conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states. People are at the boiling point.”

The “boiling point” materialized over the next two weeks, as Moore forecast, with the assistance of another CNP-linked effort called Convention of States, led by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and CNP Gold Circle member.He told the *Post* his group would function as a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the 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 the protests across the country.”The most publicized events occurred at the Michigan statehouse on April 15 and May 1, when armed protesters invaded the state Capitol, but these were far from the only ones.

The new “businessmen’s group,” previewed in The Washington Post as “100 business executives,” officially debuted on April 27, billed as the “Save Our Country Coalition.” It called for a series of measures to reopen the economy, flying in the face of expert medical recommendations for curbing the epidemic, whose U.S. death toll now approached 55,000. The CNP was heavily represented among the group’s leadership, including stalwarts such as Richard Viguerie, Ed Meese, and Kenneth Blackwell, as well as rising stars Adam Brandon, Jenny Beth Martin, and Lisa Nelson.

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mark fucking meckler(note ~ lockdown was CNP 3 prong strategy)

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservative-networks-backing-anti-quarantine-protests/2020/04/22/da75c81e-83fe-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

wapo no lnx

Politics

The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping.

Protests with honking horns, anti-shutdown signs and angry Americans continued in Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin on April 18. (The Washington Post)]

By

Isaac Stanley-Becker

and

Tony Romm

April 22, 2020

The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”

But the posts, funded by an initiative called Convention of States, were not the product of a grass-roots uprising alone. Instead, they represented one salvo in a wide-ranging and well-

financed conservative campaign to undermine restrictions that medical experts say are necessary to contain the coronavirus — but that protesters call overkill and whose economic fallout could damage President Trump’s political prospects.

A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.

Protesters assemble near the Texas State Capitol during a recent demonstration April 18 in Austin.

]

The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.

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It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Floridaand a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. A spokesman for Carson declined to comment. Cuccinelli and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.

“We’re providing a digital platform for people to plan and communicate about what they’re doing,” said Eric O’Keefe, board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Convention of States project.

A longtime associate of the conservative activist Koch family, O’Keefe helped manage David Koch’s 1980 bid for the White House when he served as the No. 2 on the Libertarian ticket.

“To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City, or in some sense Milwaukee, is draconian,” saidO’Keefe, who lives in Wisconsin.

Polls suggest most Americans support local directives encouraging them to stay at home as covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, ravages the country, killing more than 44,000 people in the United States so far. Public health officials, including epidemiologists advising Trump’s White House, agree that sweeping restrictions represent the most effective mitigation strategy in the absence of a vaccine, which could be more than a year away.

White House aides, outside groups launch effort to reopen economy

Still, some activists insist that states should lift controls on commercial activity and public assembly, citing the effects of mass closures on businesses. They have been encouraged at times by Trump, whose attorney general, William P. Barr, said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that the Justice Department would consider supporting lawsuits against restrictions that go “too far.”

Further afield, the protests have been encouraged by some of the president’s allies outside the White House, including Stephen Moore,once considered for a top post at the Federal Reserve.

The swelling frustration on the right coincides with major policy changes in some states, especially those with Republican governors. Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have begun relaxing their restrictions in recent days after bowing to pressure and imposing far-reaching guidelines.

The protests are reminiscent in some ways of the tea party movement and the demonstrations against the Affordable Care Act that erupted in 2010, which also involved a mix of homegrown activism and shrewd behind-the-scenes funding.

For the Convention of States, public health is an unusual focus.It was founded to push for a convention that would add a ­balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That same anti-government impulse is now animating the group’s campaign against coronavirus precautions.

“Heavy-handed government orders that interfere with our most basic liberties will do more harm than good,” read its Facebook ads, which had been viewed as many as 36,000 times as of Tuesday evening.

Asking for a $5 donation “to support our fight,” the paid posts are part of an online blitz called “Open the States,” which also includes newly created websites, a data-collecting petition and an ominous video about the economic effects of the lockdown.

The group’s president, Mark Meckler, said his aim was to act as a “clearinghouse where these guys can all find each other” — a role he learned as co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group also active in the tea party movement, is seeking to play a similar function, creating an online calendar of protests.

“The major need back in 2009 was no different than it is today — some easy centralizing point to list events, to allow people to communicate with each other,” he said.

Meckler, who draws a salary of about $250,000 from the Convention of States parent group, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, hailed the “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.”

So far, the protests against stay-at-home orders in states including Washington and Pennsylvania have captured headlines and drawn rebukes from some governors and epidemiologists. Experts say a sudden, widespread reopening of the country is likely to worsen the outbreak, overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands.

The protesters so far have not aimed their ire at Trump, though it is his administration’s experts whose guidelines underlie many of the states’ actions.

Trump’s public comments — including his recent tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” states including Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot — have catalyzed some of the broader public reaction. Following those tweets, tens of thousands of people joined Facebook groups calling for protests in states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the efforts are coordinated by a trio of brothers who typically focus their efforts on fighting gun control.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

In recent days, conservatives have set their sights on Wisconsin, where a few dozen protesters turned out at the Capitol to air their frustrations with Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, after he extended his state’s stay-at-home order until late May. Ahead of the demonstration, Moore, the Trump ally, revealed on a live stream that he was “working with a group” in the state with the goal of trying “to shut down the capital.”

Moore, who served as a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, said he had located a big donor to aid in the effort, though he never elaborated. “I told him about this, and he said, ‘Steve, I promise to pay the bail and legal fees for anyone who gets arrested,’?” Moore said in the video. He likened his quest to the civil rights movement, adding, “We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices.”

Moore, who has also worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, among those organizing “Operation Gridlock” was Meshawn Maddock, who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board and is a prominent figure in the “Women for Trump” coalition. Funds to promote the demonstrations on Facebook came from the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by Greg McNeilly, a longtime adviser to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

McNeilly said the money used to advance the anti-quarantine protests came from “grass-roots fundraising efforts” and had “nothing to do with any DeVos work.”

Many of the seemingly scattered, spontaneous outbursts of citizen activism reflect deeply interwoven networks of conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. One of the most vocal groups opposing the lockdown in Texas is an Austin-based conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which also hails the demonstrations nationwide.

“Some Americans are angry,” its director wrote in an op-ed promoted on Facebook and placed in the local media, telling readers in Texas about the achievements of protesters in Michigan.

The board vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, oil executive Tim Dunn, is also a founding board member of the group promoting the Convention of States initiative. And the foundation’s former president, Brooke Rollins, now works as an assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

Neither Dunn nor Rollins responded to requests for comment.

The John Hancock Committee for the States — the name used in IRS filings by the group behind the Convention of States — gave more than $100,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2011.

The Convention of States project, meanwhile, has received backing from DonorsTrust, a tax-exempt financial conduit for right-wing causes that does not disclose its contributors. The same fund has helped bankroll theIdaho Freedom Foundation,which is encouraging protests of a stay-at-home order imposed by the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little.

“Disobey Idaho,” say its Facebook ads, which use an image of the “Join or Die” snake woodcut emblematic of the Revolutionary War and later adopted by the tea party movement.

In 2014, the year before it launched theConvention of States initiative, Citizens for Self-Governance received $500,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation,a donation Meckler said helped jump-start the campaign. Mercer declined to comment.

While groups and individual activists associated with the Koch brothers have boosted this far-flung network, Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group, sought to distance the organization from the protest activity, which she said was “not the best way” to “get people back to work.”

“Instead, we are working directly with policymakers, to bring business leaders and public health officials together to help develop standards to safely reopen the economy without jeopardizing public health,” Seidel said.

But others see linkages to groups pushing anti-quarantine uprisings.

“The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in groups supporting these protests is clear to me,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University whose research has focused on climate lobbying. “The presence of allies on the board usually means that they are deeply engaged in the organization and most likely a funder.”

Brulle said the blowback against the coronavirus precautions carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action.

“These are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government,” he said. “It’s an anti-government crusade.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/constitutional-convention/

Paul Krugman, liberal economist and long-time columnist for the New York Times, has argued that Republicans have long since ceased to view Democrats as the loyal opposition — and that they don't believe that Democrats even have "the right to govern." Journalist Travis Waldron, in an article published by HuffPost this week, examines the type of changes that far-right Republicans would make to the U.S. Constitution if a constitutional convention were to come about. And according to Waldron, "The project to overhaul the Constitution is much closer to fruition than most people realize."

"Since 2014, the Convention of States Project and other conservative groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have helped persuade lawmakers in 15 states to pass resolutions that call for a new constitutional convention," Waldron explains. "Led by a prominent right-wing activist ― former Tea Party Patriots founder Mark Meckler, who is also the current acting CEO of Parler, a social media platform popular on the right ― the Convention of States Project has spread the gospel of a convention to an increasingly radical audience.This year, lawmakers proposed 42 Convention of States resolutions in at least24 new states, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has long monitored the convention push."

Article V of the U.S. Constitution allows a constitutional convention to be called if two-thirds of the states called for one, which means that34 states would be needed.

Dave Super, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that a constitutional convention is a strong possibility if Republicans perform well in the 2022 midterms.

Super told HuffPost, "I think if (Republicans) win the midterm elections, if they take the House and Senate, they will try to call an Article V convention immediately. It's not a foregone conclusion that the simple Republican majority would get there, but if they get big majorities, I think they'll try."

Some civil libertarians, Waldron warns, fear the type of changes far-right Republicans would make to the U.S. Constitution if a constitutional convention were held.

According to Waldron, "Opponents…. see a far more nefarious plot: a master class in astroturfing that could open the entire document up to a radical rewrite meant to serve the right-wing corporate interests that already dominate our politics, especially at the state level. The convention, they argue, could lead to the demolition of everything from the social safety net and environmental protections to civil rights laws. Or maybe even the Constitution itself."

Both liberals and right-wing libertarians who spoke to HuffPost are worried about what Republicans would do at a constitutional convention.

Jay Riestenberg of the liberal group Common Cause told HuffPost, "The 1st Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment — any civil rights, any constitutional protection in the Constitution could be up for grabs in this constitutional convention." And Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, told HuffPost, "We shouldn't want to go down that road, especially now that we've just had an experience of how dangerous and unpleasant it is to get close to a constitutional legitimacy crisis."

Although the Cato Instituteis quite conservative on economic issues, the libertarian think tank has been highly critical of the more authoritarian ideas pushed by some Republicans and social conservatives.

Waldron notes that because an "an Article V convention has never been called," the "legal limits haven't yet been meaningfully tested."

Some liberals like the idea of a constitutional convention, but Super fears that if one were held, it would be the far-right — not liberals or progressives — calling the shots.

Super told HuffPost, "My fears are basically that the oil and gas industry makes sure that we can ever have cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, and makes it very easy for a single friendly administration to give them irrevocable rights to public lands that the Takings Clause would prevent anyone from ever taking from them — so basically, crippling environmental enforcement."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-protests-astroturf.html

Opinion

Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Protests?

They are anything but spontaneous.

By Lisa Graves

Ms. Graves is the executive director of True North Research and curator of KochDocs.

April 22, 2020

A protest against Michigan’s stay-at-home order outside the State Capitol last week.

]

I first became aware of the political influence of Charles and David Koch in 2009 when I started looking into who was behind the protests at health care town halls.

The Tea Party, formed after America elected its first black president, used a series of health care town halls to spur angry Republicans to oppose the Affordable Care Act as a socialist takeover of American medicine. Little matter that it was modeled on a plan devised by Mitt Romney, a Republican, when he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Such false claims about the act have not aged well, as millions of Americans now depend on the law for health care coverage as the coronavirus contagion sweeps across the nation. And yet a Tea Party co-founder, Mark Meckler, is using the same tactics and same phony claims to stir his followers to protest against governors seeking to mitigate the Covid-19 death toll by closing businesses and banning public gatherings.

That public anger is both real and manufactured. The same was true in 2009, when the Koch fortune fueled the Tea Party’s attacks on the Obama administration’s health care law.

Still, the legend that the Tea Party was a spontaneous uprising took hold and continues to be peddled. As we face Tea Party 2.0, let’s not be fooled again.

The protests playing out now have the same feel as the Tea Party protests aided by Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity and others a decade ago — and with good reason: Early evidence suggests they are not organic but a brush fire being stoked by some of the same people and money that built the Tea Party.

Look no further than the first protest organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund — whose chairman manages the vast financial investments of Dick and Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary — to see that the campaign to “open” America flows from the superrich and their front groups.

Stephen Moore — a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Koch ally and a Trump adviser — admitted as much in a video I obtained comparing these new protesters to Rosa Parks, as first reported in The Times.

Mr. Moore, who is now leading an enterprise to end the virus precautions called Save Our Country, which includes the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, boasted that he has been working behind the scenes with a conservative donor who agreed to cover bail and legal fees for demonstrators who get arrested for defying Wisconsin’s virus protective measures.

Others are providing legal assistance as well. The Times reports that a private Facebook group called Reopen NC has retained the legal services of Michael Best & Friedrich, a Wisconsin law firm whose clients include President Trump. The firm is well known for its work with dark-money groups that fought the recall of the Koch ally Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and waged war on unions.

Then there’s the Convention of States, established in 2015 with a big contribution from the conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. The group recruits activists at gun shows to support a balanced-budget amendment and is promoting the protests online via “Open the States.” COS is an offshoot of Citizens for Self-Governance, which Mr. Meckler co-founded with a longtime Koch operative, Eric O’Keefe.

To give you a flavor of what’s unfolding to help orchestrate these events, this week one of Mr. Meckler’s organizers told supporters via Facebook that “optics are everything” and that they should be sure to wear a mask to the protests and stand six feet apart — because it will make the crowds look bigger.

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COS and a Koch-financed public relations firm, In Pursuit Of, are also purchasing domain names tied to protests to open the states, suggesting they are investing for a long battle — even as the death toll rises.

The consequences are already starting. One week after a Kentucky protest, the state experienced its largest spike in coronavirus cases. Other states may soon see similar spikes.

Those fanning these flames, including President Trump and Fox News hosts, are unlikely to get burned by infection themselves, though they may be goading their followers to risk their health by attending mass demonstrations.

America is now facing three calamities: a deadly contagion, a capricious president and a well-funded right-wing infrastructure willing to devalue human life in pursuit of its political agenda. Some very rich men and women are making this medical disaster worse through their reckless bellows, inflaming people to demand that states open now no matter how many lives that costs.

Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research and curator of KochDocs, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

=

2x?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservative-networks-backing-anti-quarantine-protests/2020/04/22/da75c81e-83fe-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

wapo no lnx

Politics

The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping.

Protests with honking horns, anti-shutdown signs and angry Americans continued in Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin on April 18. (The Washington Post)]

By

Isaac Stanley-Becker

and

Tony Romm

April 22, 2020

The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”

But the posts, funded by an initiative called Convention of States, were not the product of a grass-roots uprising alone. Instead, they represented one salvo in a wide-ranging and well-

financed conservative campaign to undermine restrictions that medical experts say are necessary to contain the coronavirus — but that protesters call overkill and whose economic fallout could damage President Trump’s political prospects.

A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.

Protesters assemble near the Texas State Capitol during a recent demonstration April 18 in Austin.

]

The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.

It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. A spokesman for Carson declined to comment. Cuccinelli and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.

“We’re providing a digital platform for people to plan and communicate about what they’re doing,” said Eric O’Keefe, board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Convention of States project.

A longtime associate of the conservative activist Koch family, O’Keefe helped manage David Koch’s 1980 bid for the White House when he served as the No. 2 on the Libertarian ticket.

“To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City, or in some sense Milwaukee, is draconian,” said O’Keefe, who lives in Wisconsin.

Polls suggest most Americans support local directives encouraging them to stay at home as covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, ravages the country, killing more than 44,000 people in the United States so far. Public health officials, including epidemiologists advising Trump’s White House, agree that sweeping restrictions represent the most effective mitigation strategy in the absence of a vaccine, which could be more than a year away.

White House aides, outside groups launch effort to reopen economy

Still, some activists insist that states should lift controls on commercial activity and public assembly, citing the effects of mass closures on businesses. They have been encouraged at times by Trump, whose attorney general, William P. Barr, said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that the Justice Department would consider supporting lawsuits against restrictions that go “too far.”

Further afield, the protests have been encouraged by some of the president’s allies outside the White House, including Stephen Moore, once considered for a top post at the Federal Reserve.

The swelling frustration on the right coincides with major policy changes in some states, especially those with Republican governors. Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have begun relaxing their restrictions in recent days after bowing to pressure and imposing far-reaching guidelines.

The protests are reminiscent in some ways of the tea party movement and the demonstrations against the Affordable Care Act that erupted in 2010, which also involved a mix of homegrown activism and shrewd behind-the-scenes funding.

For the Convention of States, public health is an unusual focus.It was founded to push for a convention that would add a ­balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That same anti-government impulse is now animating the group’s campaign against coronavirus precautions.

“Heavy-handed government orders that interfere with our most basic liberties will do more harm than good,” read its Facebook ads, which had been viewed as many as 36,000 times as of Tuesday evening.

Asking for a $5 donation “to support our fight,” the paid posts are part of an online blitz called “Open the States,” which also includes newly created websites, a data-collecting petition and an ominous video about the economic effects of the lockdown.

The group’s president, Mark Meckler, said his aim was to act as a “clearinghouse where these guys can all find each other” — a role he learned as co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group also active in the tea party movement, is seeking to play a similar function, creating an online calendar of protests.

“The major need back in 2009 was no different than it is today — some easy centralizing point to list events, to allow people to communicate with each other,” he said.

Meckler, who draws a salary of about $250,000 from the Convention of States parent group, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, hailed the “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.”

So far, the protests against stay-at-home orders in states including Washington and Pennsylvania have captured headlines and drawn rebukes from some governors and epidemiologists. Experts say a sudden, widespread reopening of the country is likely to worsen the outbreak, overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands.

The protesters so far have not aimed their ire at Trump, though it is his administration’s experts whose guidelines underlie many of the states’ actions.

Trump’s public comments — including his recent tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” states including Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot — have catalyzed some of the broader public reaction. Following those tweets, tens of thousands of people joined Facebook groups calling for protests in states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the efforts are coordinated by a trio of brothers who typically focus their efforts on fighting gun control.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

In recent days, conservatives have set their sights on Wisconsin, where a few dozen protesters turned out at the Capitol to air their frustrations with Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, after he extended his state’s stay-at-home order until late May. Ahead of the demonstration, Moore, the Trump ally, revealed on a live stream that he was “working with a group” in the state with the goal of trying “to shut down the capital.”

Moore, who served as a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, said he had located a big donor to aid in the effort, though he never elaborated. “I told him about this, and he said, ‘Steve, I promise to pay the bail and legal fees for anyone who gets arrested,’?” Moore said in the video. He likened his quest to the civil rights movement, adding, “We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices.”

Moore, who has also worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, among those organizing “Operation Gridlock” was Meshawn Maddock, who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board and is a prominent figure in the “Women for Trump” coalition. Funds to promote the demonstrations on Facebook came from the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by Greg McNeilly, a longtime adviser to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

McNeilly said the money used to advance the anti-quarantine protests came from “grass-roots fundraising efforts” and had “nothing to do with any DeVos work.”

Many of the seemingly scattered, spontaneous outbursts of citizen activism reflect deeply interwoven networks of conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. One of the most vocal groups opposing the lockdown in Texas is an Austin-based conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which also hails the demonstrations nationwide.

“Some Americans are angry,” its director wrote in an op-ed promoted on Facebook and placed in the local media, telling readers in Texas about the achievements of protesters in Michigan.

The board vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, oil executive Tim Dunn, is also a founding board member of the group promoting the Convention of States initiative. And the foundation’s former president, Brooke Rollins, now works as an assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

Neither Dunn nor Rollins responded to requests for comment.

The John Hancock Committee for the States— the name used in IRS filings by the group behind the Convention of States — gave more than $100,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2011.

The Convention of States project, meanwhile, has received backing from DonorsTrust, a tax-exempt financial conduit for right-wing causes that does not disclose its contributors. The same fund has helped bankroll the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is encouraging protests of a stay-at-home order imposed by the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little.

“Disobey Idaho,” say its Facebook ads, which use an image of the “Join or Die” snake woodcut emblematic of the Revolutionary War and later adopted by the tea party movement.

In 2014, the year before it launched the Convention of States initiative, Citizens for Self-Governance received $500,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation, a donation Meckler said helped jump-start the campaign. Mercer declined to comment.

While groups and individual activists associated with the Koch brothers have boosted this far-flung network, Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group, sought to distance the organization from the protest activity, which she said was “not the best way” to “get people back to work.”

“Instead, we are working directly with policymakers, to bring business leaders and public health officials together to help develop standards to safely reopen the economy without jeopardizing public health,” Seidel said.

But others see linkages to groups pushing anti-quarantine uprisings.

“The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in groups supporting these protests is clear to me,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University whose research has focused on climate lobbying. “The presence of allies on the board usually means that they are deeply engaged in the organization and most likely a funder.”

Brulle said the blowback against the coronavirus precautions carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action.

“These are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government,” he said. “It’s an anti-government crusade.”

---

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_Patriots

mark meckler lawyer herbalife

==

http://www.prwatch.org/node/12379

Wisconsin is the latest state to line up behind a national effort to amend the Constitution and cripple the federal government's ability to spend -- likely forcing steep cuts in popular earned benefit programs such as Social Security and blocking Congress from responding to economic downturns or natural disasters -- apparently with the ultimate goal of completely overhauling America's system of governance.

Assembly Joint Resolution 81, which passed out of committee on Wednesday, would call for an Article V Constitutional Convention to force a federal balanced budget amendment. Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides that thirty-four states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose an amendment, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths). The legislation closely tracks the "Balanced Budget Amendment Resolution"from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and allied advocacy groups promoting an Article V convention.

ALEC's Stealth Convention

"AJR 81 comes right out of the 'Convention of States' workshop and materials presented at ALEC where state legislators were promised bundled campaign contributions and grassroots support if they joined this effort to amend the federal constitution," said Rep. Chris Taylor, a Madison Democrat who attended ALEC's Annual Meeting in Chicago last summer, in a statement. "I am alarmed that this effort is now making its way through the Wisconsin legislature and is tentatively scheduled to be considered by the full Assembly next Tuesday."

ALEC has published a "how-to" manual for an Article V constitutional amendment, and at its last two meetings hosted workshops on amendment strategy from the group "Citizens for Self Governance," led by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler, and whose board includes WisconsiniteEric O'Keefe (who has spoken publicly about being subpoenaed in Wisconsin's John Doe probe in his role as Director of Wisconsin Club for Growth). Citizens for Self Governance seeks to use the amendment process to severely restrict federal power, for example by redefining the Commerce Clause to prohibit Congress from enacting child labor or anti-discrimination laws. In recent years, the Article V idea has spread in Republican circles thanks to right-wing radio host and author Mark Levin, and has been elevated by the likes of Glenn Beck.

---

wiki

itizens for Self-Governance (CSG) is an American political organization that advocates for the restoration of self-governance across the United States.

Contents

  [hide] 

Leadership

Mark Meckler serves as President of CSG.[1] Meckler was previously co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots before resigning from that group.[2]

Activities

Lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service

CSG filed a class action lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, alleging violations under the Privacy Act as well as violations of constitutional rights guaranteeing free expression and equal protection under the law.[3] The lawsuit stemmed from IRS targeting of conservative groups for more scrutiny as they applied for tax-exempt status.[4][5][6]

Convention of the States

CSG has called for a convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution.[7][8][9][10][11][12] According to Meckler:

By calling a convention of states, we can stop the federal spending and debt spree, the power grabs of the federal courts, and other misuses of federal power. The current situation is precisely what the Founders feared, and they gave us a solution we have a duty to use.

—Mark Meckler in Slate Magazine[8]

Mark Levin has supported CSG's efforts to a call a second constitutional convention.[13] CSG opened numerous chapters across the nation to urge state legislators to summon a national convention; for example, in Virginia, the group sponsored the founder of Patrick Henry College, Michael Farris, to launch a Convention of States Project which is a forum for delegates appointed by state governments to propose amendments to the constitution.[14]

See also

==

Top Quotes from ALEC's 40th Birthday Party in Chicago

by Brendan Fischer [1] — August 22, 2013 - 8:13am

 Share this [2]

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month was marked by massive protests outside, but inside the walls of the Palmer House Hotel, the business of this notoriously secretive organization went forward as usual. The few quotes that have trickled out from inside the ALEC meeting are revealing.

Public Resentment and Right to Work

A reporter for The Economist [3] attended some of the workshops (but was barred from the task force meetings where bills are considered), and reported that:

Such a strategy is often suspected, but rarely voiced. It was deployed by ALEC alum Scott Walker and legislative Republicans in Wisconsin, for example, when they launched their infamous ALEC-inspired attack on public sector unions.

And ALEC plans to ramp up these attacks next year. At a workshop titled "How Lawmakers Passed Right to Work, Medicaid, and Tax Reform in Their States" -- sponsored by the State Policy Network at a $40,000 price point -- Missouri's [4] Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said:

Who Needs Voters When We Have Money and the John Birch Society?

At a workshop titled "Calling a Convention of the States: The Constitutional Check on the Abuses of Federal Power," Mark Meckler, founder of the Tea Party Patriots and now head of a group called Citizens for Self Governance -- a top sponsor of the ALEC meeting -- announced the launch of a new project to encourage state legislatures to call an Article V Convention of the States to stop what they call [5] "the runaway train of the federal government." One state representative from Arizona reportedly stood up and asked:

Wisconsin Rep. Chris Taylor, a Democrat who infiltrated the ALEC meeting, recounted a conversation [6] with a private sector ALEC member who also was advocating a constitutional amendment to rein-in the federal government. He told her:

And, at Wednesday's plenary lunch, the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore (an ALEC "scholar") declared:

Push Back on Critics

Some 2,700 people rallied outside the conference on Thursday, shutting down the streets in front of the Palmer House, chanting "ALEC, go home" and waving signs reading "ALEC: 40 Years of Corporate Greed." They were the largest protests in ALEC's four-decade history, and come after two years of unprecedented public scrutiny where 49 corporations have dropped their ALEC membership and the public has grown increasingly suspicious of ALEC's corporate-friendly legislation. The controversies were certainly noticed inside the luxurious Palmer House.

John Tillman of the Illinois Policy Institute spoke at Wednesday's lunch, and asserted:

Among the enemies, apparently, was the New York Times, whose reporters, columnists, and editorial board have been critical of the way ALEC facilitates special interest influence over state legislatures. Speaking at that same lunch, Stephen Moore -- whose Wall Street Journal editorial board ran a pro-ALEC editorial the same day [7] -- reportedly declared, to thunderous applause from the crowd, that:

Also at the meeting, ALEC collected signatures on a letter to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois complaining that his inquiries to ALEC corporate members about their position on Stand Your Ground was a form of "intimidation." ALEC claimed to have gathered 293 signatures from legislators, but as ProgressNow discovered [8], at least 55 signatures were invalid: 35 duplicates, 4 signatures from spouses, 7 unidentifiable. And one rant, apparently from Arizona State Sen. Don Shooter, who signed:

The Endangered Species Act "A Matter of Life and Death"

At Thursday's lunch, an official from the Texas Oil and Gas Association spoke about the dangers of the federal Endangered Species Act. According to Rep. Taylor, he discussed how:

Give Thanks to the Corporate Funders!

As usual, this year's ALEC meeting was bankrolled by the corporate members [9] that stand to benefit from the adoption of ALEC model legislation. The top sponsor was Reynolds tobacco, followed by fossil fuel companies like Peabody Energy and Exxon Mobil, as well as virtual school provider K12 Inc. After hours, politicians attended corporate-sponsored events, like the annual ALEC "cigar party," where lobbyists and legislators mingled at a spot along the Chicago River, enjoyed an open bar and dessert spread, and were reminded with prominently-displayed signs that the party was funded by Reynolds tobacco and the Cigar Association of America.

And legislators were consistently instructed to be thankful to those footing the bill. At Thursday's lunch, just before an official from the Texas Oil and Gas Association spoke about the dangers of the federal Endangered Species Act, ALEC's private-sector chairman, C. Stevens Seale, of SAP America, reminded legislators in the crowd [10] to be grateful:

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

---

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/08/12216/top-quotes-alecs-40th-birthday-party-chicago

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35275/brendan-fischer

[2] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2013%2F08%2F12216%2Ftop-quotes-alecs-40th-birthday-party-chicago&linkname=Top%20Quotes%20from%20ALEC%27s%2040th%20Birthday%20Party%20in%20Chicago

[3] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21583658-how-left-wing-protesters-helped-conservative-club-ghost-writes-state-laws-smart-alec

[4] http://bhcourier.com/missouri-lt-governor-well-pass-right-to-work-in-2014-ohioans-prepare-for-legislative-fallout/2013/08/19

[5] http://conventionofstates.com/about-us

[6] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/16/wisconsin-democrat-who-infiltrated-alec-they-dont-want-people-involved-in-the-political-process/

[7] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/08/12215/wall-street-journal-defends-alec-without-disclosing-deep-ties-editorial-board-mem

[8] http://progressnow.org/alec/alec-durbin.html

[9] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/08/12212/alecexposed-list-corporations-and-special-interests-underwrote-alecs-40th-anniver

[10] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/08/alec-meeting-in-chicago_n_3728213.html

==

busted w. glock at airport

TPP implodes: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/tea_party_patriots/

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/more_internal_strife_for_the_tea_party_patriots_as.php

Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, announced Friday that he would be leaving over differences in the group’s direction.

“Mark Meckler’s resignation as an employee and from the Tea Party Patriots board follows months of discussions and good-faith differences on how best TPP can serve the Tea Party movement,” the Tea Party Patriots said in a statement. “He felt it necessary to step aside and pursue other endeavors. We extend our best wishes to him. He has done many good things for the movement.”

“The movement and Tea Party Patriots will continue to grow stronger and to build an enduring grass-roots organization that increases public support for our ideals of fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets,” the statement said.

Meckler, who founded the group along with Jenny Beth Martin and is a prominent spokesman for the Tea Party movement, reportedly sent an e-mail to the Board of Directors of the TPP saying that he has “fought long and hard” to keep the group “as an organization that is run from the bottom up, with the intent of serving the grassroots.”

“Unfortunately, it is my belief that I have lost this fight,” Meckler said, according to the Daily Caller. “I probably fought the internal fight longer than I should have, but I wanted to give absolutely every possible effort to preserving what I believe was the unique nature of the TPP organization.”

Meckler did not return TPM’s request for comment.

Meckler’s departure is decidedly more amicable than that of Amy Kremer, now the Chairman of the Tea Party Express, who was ousted from the TPP Board of Directors in 2009.

Kremer, who also helped to found the group, joined the Tea Party Express in September 2009, and was canned from the TPP board because of concerns that the TPX was too closely tied to Republicans. Shortly after, TPP sued Kremer over the rights to the Tea Party Patriots name, which they said she was using in activities not affiliated with the group.

In October of last year, Kylie Kremer, apparently Amy’s daughter, sued the TPP and alleged that Jenny Beth Martin and her husband, TPP’s CEO Lee Martin, defamed her on “a public group in Facebook” under the alias “Dale Buttersworth” with a post that she “had been raped, reported the rape to the police and was kicked out of her home by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend as a result of reporting the rape.”

The TPP called the suit is part of Kremer’s “long-standing animosity” against them.

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  1. ### More Internal Strife For The Tea Party Patriots As **...** - TPMMuckraker 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../more_internal_strife_for_the_...‎

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Feb 24, 2012 - Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, announced Friday that he would be leaving over differences in the group's direction.

Party Foul! Tea Partiers Eat Their Own In Bitter **...** - TPMMuckraker 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../party_foul_tea_partiers_eat_t...‎

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Nov 12, 2009 - Emails obtained by TPMmuckraker detail how a rogue faction of Tea Party Patriots is lashing out at the board for going ahead with the suit **...

Defamation Suit Against Tea Party Group Part Of **...** - TPMMuckraker 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../defamation_suit_against_tea_...‎

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Oct 20, 2011 - The Tea Party Patriots say that a defamation lawsuit filed against them is just part of continued “animosity” from Amy Kremer, **...** TPMMuckraker.

Tea Party Patriots Rally Against NPR After O'Keefe Video **... 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../tea_party_patriots_rally_again...‎

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Mar 8, 2011 - The Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group for state and local Tea Party groups around the country, is rallying its supporters against NPR in **...

'The Tea Party Movement Is About To Be Hijacked **...** - TPMMuckraker 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../the_tea_party_movement_is_...‎

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Jan 11, 2010 - Tea Party Patriots, which helped put together a September rally that **...**anything like that,” Meckler told TPMmuckraker, referring to the price tag.

Tea Party Patriots | TPMDC 

tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/tea-party-patriots/‎

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May 2, 2013 - TPMDC Tea Party Patriots. **...** On Wednesday, Tea Party Patriots' co-founder Jenny Beth Martin penned an op-ed on Breitbart.com decrying the **...

Tea Party Movement Spreads To Military | TPMMuckraker 

tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/.../tea_party_movement_spreads...‎

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Apr 12, 2010 - A new Tea Party group, Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots, has grown **...** at Camp Pendleton in southern California — told TPMmuckraker in an **...

--

BENJY SARLIN MARCH 8, 2011, 1:33 PM

The Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group for state and local Tea Party groups around the country, is rallying its supporters against NPR in response to hidden camera footage of an NPR executive, Ron Schiller, describing the movement’s members as “seriously, seriously racist people.”

The video was filmed by James O’Keefe’s group, Project Veritas, and featured the group’s members having lunch with Schillerwhile posing as a phony Muslim advocacy groupinterested in donating $5 million to NPR. In addition to his comments on the Tea Party, Schiller is shown in the video saying that NPR does not need federal funding, which the Patriots argue demonstrates that House Republican efforts to cut the news organization’s funds are on the mark.

“Mr. Schiller himself candidly admits in the video that NPR doesn’t need federal funding, and welcomes the opportunity to slant their reporting without the oversight of the taxpayer,” Mark Meckler, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots wrote in an e-mail to supporters today. “At a time when the country is upside down by more than a trillion dollars, can we really afford to provide huge subsidies to entities that openly state that they don’t need the money? Let’s take his advice and pass legislation that would defund the clearly biased news organization that is out of touch with Americans across the country.”

Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin also targeted Schiller’s comments, writing that they were “indicative of the mentality of ruling elites who are threatened by the power of the Tea Party Patriots. This bizarre behavior comes at a time when Americans are taking their country back through the legislative process. Political victory has led to policy victory, and the elite had better wake up to the new reality.”

The e-mail called on Tea Party Patriots members to contact their members of Congress to keep pressure up against NPR as the House and Senate debate whether to defund the organization. The House has already passed a bill that would cut NPR’s funding and Senate Republicansintroduced similar legislation this week. NPR has put out a statement in response to the video saying the organization is “appalled” by Schiller’s filmed remarks.

--

Top Tea Party Leader Was Paid By GOP Biz Group's Campaign

Zachary Roth | March 3, 2010, 11:35AM

Read More

Carly Fiorina, Citizen Power Campaign, Lincoln Club of Orange County, Mark Meckler, Steve Poizner, Tea Parties, Tea Party Patriots

A top Tea Party leader who has publicly distanced his group from the GOP was recently paid by a campaign run by an influential California Republican business organization, to gather signatures for a ballot initiative that's long been a key goal of the state party.

Mark Meckler, one of two national spokespeople for the Tea Party Patriots, was recently paid $7,500 for "petition circulation management" by the "Citizen Power Campaign Supported by the Lincoln Club of Orange County," according to state disclosure records. Meckler's involvement with the campaign was first reported last month by the website Red County.

Yesterday, we reported that Meckler, a northern California lawyer, had also helped run a political consulting firm with ties to Washington D.C. Republicans.

The Lincoln Club, a group of southern California Republican businesspeople, is an influential player in state GOP circles. "The Club's founders created an organization that included a wide spectrum of beliefs within the Republican Party," it declares on its website. The group had a key role in the 1978 passage of the state's anti-property tax ballot measure, and in the 2003 recall of Democratic governor Gray Davis.

The Club's profile as a power center for business conservatives -- according to its website, its membership "is comprised chiefly of entrepreneurs, CEOs, professionals, and executives from a wide spectrum of industries" -- would appear to sit uneasily with the Tea Party's more populist, anti-corporate ethos.

The Citizen Power Campaign is the Lincoln Club's latest big-ticket project. It aims to gather enough signatures from voters to place a measure on the ballot this November which would make it illegal to use taxpayer money, deducted from the paychecks of public employees, for political activity. That would take away a key source of funding for the state's public employees union, and make it more difficult for pro-labor candidates to get elected.

Passing the initiative, often known as "paycheck protection," has long been a goal of the state GOP, and the effort was endorsed earlier this year by Senate candidate Carly Fiorina and gubernatorial hopeful Steve Poizner, among other California Republicans. Voters rejected paycheck protection initiatives in 1998 and 2005, both times by 53-47 margins.

Meckler's involvement with the campaign -- coming on the heels of yesterday's news about his GOP-tied consulting firm -- could intensify the fears of many grassroots Tea Partiers that their movement is being hijacked by Republican operatives. Meckler has gone out of his way recently to stress his independence from the GOP. "The major parties in this nation haven't represented the American people," he told TPMmuckraker in an interview in January, and lamented to a recent interviewer: "I felt like the Republican Party didn't represent my values. The political parties represent entrenched interests ... and they never do what they say."

Meckler reportedly sent out a recent email to friends and family asking for financial help.

Late Update: Meckler responds:

I did get paid for about two months with the Citizen Power Campaign, but the campaign didn't have the money to continue paying me, so that was discontinued. Back to struggling to survive. It's all good though. It's a worthwhile fight, and I'm fighting on...paid or not...just a little less time to spend.

As for working with a GOP-tied group... we align with folks who share our values on particular projects and initiatives. In some places and times that will be folks who have ties to Republicans, past or present, sometimes it will be Young Republicans, 9/12 groups, libertarian organizations, Democratic committees and organizations, and many, many others. Unlike the political paradigms of the past, we're not really interested in party labels. We're interested in principles. Party labels are a great way to divide people, even when they agree in principle. We're more interested in aligning with people and organizations that share our principles on particular issues. The principle here is that we believe that public employee union money has corrupted California's politics to the point where the citizens no longer have any real power. With hundreds of millions of dollars per year to pour into the political system, the system is impossibly corrupted and controlled by the public employee unions. Until this is changed, California has no chance of climbing out of the fiscal cesspool into which it has descended. We align on this issue with people and organizations that believe that the public employee unions have too much money and power in our system, and are causing its downfall. I don't care if those people are Republicans, Democrats, independents or however else they wish to label themselves. We'll let others worry about the labels, and we'll stay focused on principle. The principles are what will ultimately prevail, not the parties.

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tpm

Mark Meckler, a top Tea Party leader, has worked hard to position the movement as a grassroots uprising, independent of both political parties. But just a few years ago, Meckler was involved in an online political consulting firm with ties to the GOP -- a fact that could intensify the fears of some Tea Party activists that their movement is being hijacked by Republican political operatives.

Since last year, Meckler, a northern California lawyer, has emerged as one of two national leaders and spokespeople for the Tea Party Patriots, giving frequent interviews to national news outlets. Working closely with the Atlanta-based Jenny Beth Martin, Meckler has helped build TPP into perhaps the largest and most prominent of the various Tea Party factions. If the notoriously decentralized Tea Party movement can be said to have a spokesman, Meckler has as good a claim to the title as just about anyone.

Meckler has presented himself as an ordinary country lawyer, motivated to get involved, like so many other Americans, by Rick Santelli's famous rant. The Wall Street Journal recently described him as one of the "political novices" running the movement. Even one of Meckler's many email addresses seems designed to make a point -- it begins: "mark.grassroots."

Meckler has also been careful to disavow any connection between TPP and the Republican Party, and eager to tout the group's independence. Meckler didn't respond to an interview request for this story, but he told TPMmuckraker in January that "the major parties in this nation haven't represented the American people." Last month he told NewsMax: "Anybody who expects tea party members to vote based on party lines fundamentally misunderstands the movement ... The tea party movement is made up of people who value principle above party." And CNN reported last that Meckler and Martin say they are "frustrated that other Tea Party groups are being run by Republican political consultants forking over lots of cash for recruitment" -- a reference to the Tea Party Express, which is run by a GOP consulting firm.

None of this is untrue, exactly. But it leaves out the fact that Meckler appears to have aspired relatively recently to be a Republican political consultant himself. A few years ago, Meckler was listed as the general counsel for Unique Leads and Unique Lists, two related online marketing firms that specialize in building email lists on behalf of clients. In that capacity, Meckler also wrote online columns on the subject of internet privacy -- a subject in which many online marketers, anxious to avoid running afoul of anti-spam and other laws, have a keen interest.

At some point, it appears, Meckler spun off his involvement with Unique Leads to help develop a new firm, Opt-In Movement, that aimed to build email lists on behalf of political clients. Opt-In's website -- which according to internet records was registered in 2007 -- suggests that the firm aspired to work on behalf of Republican candidates and causes. One page shows examples of its work, which includes mock web pages for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential bid, Rep. Jeff Flake, Freedom's Watch, and the College Republican National Committee. The site notes that some of these examples were "designed as demonstration pieces to show the broad variety of our in-house abilities."

There's no indication on the site itself that Meckler is involved with Opt-In. A contact page lists only the email address info@optinmovement.com. But what appears to be an earlier contact page -- no longer accessible from the main site, but still online -- lists Meckler as the firm's contact, and provides a phone number that goes to Unique Leads.


Meckler also appears to have forged ties with other GOP consultants. A November 2007 blog post on the website TechRepublican.com -- which was created by the D.C.-based GOP consultant David All -- declares: "Mark Meckler told us about Opt-In Movement which offers a no risk-way for conservative political candidates and organizations to quickly and effectively build their email lists." The post also notes that All's firm, the David All Group, -- which describes itself as "the nation's first Republican Web 2.0 agency" -- is "a partner with Opt-In Movement."

It's not clear how much success Opt-In has had. Its website appears not to have been updated for several years, and Meckler reportedly sent out an email to friends and family recently asking for financial assistance, after devoting much of his time over the last year to Tea Party activism.

It stands to reason that Meckler hasn't been eager to trumpet this part of his background. Grassroots Tea Partiers have lately raised the alarm about what many of them see as the hijacking of their movement by the Republican party and its consultants. In addition to Tea Party Express, they cite last month's National Tea Party Convention -- which had Sarah Palin as its keynote speaker and had also invited two GOP members of Congress to speak -- and the recent meeting that some Tea Partiers held with RNC chair Michael Steele.

Through this turmoil, Meckler and the Tea Party Patriots have emerged as a kind of enforcer of the Tea Party movement's political independence, denouncing Tea Party Express and pointedly keeping their distance from the convention and the Steele confab. "Some people call for unity because they want to be the leader," Meckler said in a recent interview. "You see that with the GOP; they're trying to co-opt the movement as hard as they can."

Late Update: Meckler also is being paid by a California Republican business group to gather petition signatures for a ballot initiative that's long been a key goal of the state GOP, TPMmuckraker reports.

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Judge Thomas' Wife Joins TEA PARTY

:{by: AmericanRiverCanyon:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

Mon Mar 15, 2010 at 04:53:20 PDT

No, this is not snark or a joke.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was in the majority opinion of the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case whereby the court ruled that Corporations have the same rights as individual humans to free speech, that limiting money limits free speech, so therefore they can give unlimited money to campaigns,

has a wife named Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, who just started a Tea Party group.

http://www.latimes.com/news/na...

The group is a "non profit" called Liberty Central Inc.

http://libertycentral.org/

Liberty Central.org, where like minded people gather to preserve freedom in America.

She intends to take donations and issue score cards on political candidates.  She used to work for the Heritage Foundation and Dick Armey. (Armey now is chairman of Freedomworks, which is an astroturfing org masterminded by Koch Oil's David Koch, who also runs Americans for Prosperity.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...  Freedomworks is Tea Party, and harrassed Democrats at August town hall meetings in 2009.

On the endorsements page of Thomas' new lobbying group, the first gush of lying spin blather goes:

What Others are Saying about Liberty Central...

"Liberty Central, with its focus specifically on training grassroots activists interested in returning the country to its founding principles, is a necessary component of a successful, long-term conservative revolution. With its intent to serve a broad coalition of grassroots organizations, and a long term view of the new conservative revolution, Liberty Central is an organization worthy of every conservative's support."

Mark Meckler / Jenny Beth Martin, Co-Founders / National Coordinators, Tea Party Patriots

Mark Meckler is a Republican political front guy operative based in the Sacramento Northern CA area, and has done and been paid for Tea Party appearances for Russo Marsh & Rogers/ Move America Forward, the Republican PR firm which does Swiftboating and Smear campaigns, besides being the publicists for Kurdistan in Northern Iraq.  RMR/MAF is also known for their "Thank You Sarah Palin" campaign, their Tea Party anti health care reform Bus Tours featuring the anti Muslim bigot radio jock Mark Williams, and the "You Don't Speak for Me" campaign featuring their own pit bull in lip gloss, Deborah Johns, "Pentagon Liason,"  who attacks peace activists.  Meckler is also involved in the Million Mormons on Facebook, which is loaded with whacky Glenn Beck devotees who think all government activities are anti Christian conspiracies designed to turn them into communists.  See links in this story

http://www.dailykos.com/story/...

One of Meckler's many Tea Party locations, see how it says "non partisan?" -  no, Republican

http://www.facebook.com/group....

The Tea Party logos on the Liberty Central site matches the one on Mark Meckler's facebook page.  They claim to be:

misunderstood and mischaracterized by much of the mainstream media. "New citizen activists have been cast as ignorant, intolerant or a radical fringe by many in the media. The facts are now demonstrating that the mainstream media is wrong and ordinary citizens are up against biased elitists who are not seemingly interested in the truth." said Virginia Thomas, President and CEO of Liberty Central .....

Since I live in Tea Party ground zero, which is older, very wealthy Republicans manipulating anti tax populist anger combined with LDS Ron Paulian Libertarians who pretend we have no government as they collect on Medicare or work for the government, and I have witnessed Tea Party activity, let me tell you that the MSM is being too soft on them.  The MSM likes to pretend they are grassroots nutters, when they interview the hapless front guys,  when they are really Oil, Defense Contractor, Tobacco and Pharma Money, and Republicans with just another angle working.  But they endeavor to bring out the worst of human emotions, fear, selfishness, racism, and greed.

You know what "grassroots is?"  It's not Koch Oil and others, spending millions donating to a 501(c)(4) anonymously, fronting anti tax protestors to kill health care reform, keeping the mid east mercenary drone wars going, and stopping any energy policies that would cut carbon emissions and lesson the use of petrochemicals.  Add in this political "non profit" being run by a wife of a Supreme Court Justice, and we have the Supreme Court BUYING OUR ELECTIONS OUTRIGHT for the highest bidder of their services.

Jenny Beth Martin likes to make up stories about her self being just a plain, aw shucks sort of grassroots type of girl, and neglects that part on her resume where she worked for Republicans or that her failed business owes the IRS a half million dollars.   http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpoi...

Can you say Republican neocon war "grifters?'  Sure you can.

Can you say "conflict of interest ? for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas?"

per a law professor

"There is opportunity for mischief if a company with a case before the court, or which it wants the court to accept, makes a substantial contribution to Liberty Central in the interim," he said.

Justice Thomas would be required to be aware of such contributions, Gillers said, adding that he believes Thomas should then disclose those facts and allow parties in the case to argue for recusal.

But it would be up to Justice Thomas to decide whether to recuse himself. He could not be reached for comment.

http://www.latimes.com/news/na...

The LA Times story says Ginni Thomas is "intrigued by Glenn Beck and listening carefully."

Here's another endorsement of  Ginni Thomas' LibertyCentral.org

Leaders committed to smaller government, fiscal prudence, and a strong national defense will be returning to Washington D.C., and I am confident that Ginni Thomas will be part of the reason it will happen."

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense

Neglects to say it was Sec of Defense under George W. Bush, the Rumsfeld who went to war with the Army he had instead of the Army he should have planned for a peaceful Iraq occupation, which he totally effed up, who quit on the day after the Nov 2006 election. Amen.

2 more endorsements for Ginni's little Tea Party fundraising for political campaigns:

Morton C. Blackwell, President, The Leadership Institute  http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...   The "Leadership Institute"  does weekend workshops and pronounces its "graduates" as having journalism degrees  (think James Guckert, the male hooker and fake reporter for Talon News (Bobby Eberle) who pitched softball questions at WH press briefings under Rove and Bush )  Blackwell is a co founder of the Moral Majority.   Think also, the dreadful Barton kid and ex Minuteman who did the "wore his uniform to a war protest with a hanging effigy" and other ads for Russo Marsh Rogers/MAF and Tom McClintock. (Barton has been paid by Russo Marsh Rogers/MAF PACs)

Edwin J. Feulner, President, The Heritage Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...  Right wing think tank full of  Reaganites and supply sided trickle down economics.  Heritage had gotten money from Joseph Coors, Olin foundation, Scaife, DeVos, (think Amway, Prop 8 and Blackwater, that family) and Bradley foundations, in 2007 they got 48.7 million dollars per wikipedia.  Edwin Feulner was connected to the Abramoff scandal thru his co founding Belle Haven Consultants, which took Malaysian oil money and laundered it thru a non profit run by Tom Delay's friends, and ended up bribing Republicans in the Bush administration with it.  http://www.calitics.com/diary/...    http://www.dailykos.com/commen...  (How Jack Abramoff started lobbying for Malaysia only a few days after 9/11/2001, and how ex Rep. John Doolittle was involved )

The LA Times says "although Liberty Central is a non partisan group.....  "

Non partisan ?

CUT THE NONSENSE, LAT !  Have you every heard of politcal blogs, or teh google?   The Tea Party is 100% Republican.   What part of Supreme Court Palace Coup did you just miss ?

Clarence Thomas should be impeached and removed from the Supreme Court.  

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Source Watch:

Tea Party Patriots

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meckler

CNP Member:

Unknown

Family Member:

Unknown

Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots

Meckler was a top distributor for Herbalife

http://www.facebook.com/mmeckler

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/tea-partys-march-madness

https://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/cashing-in-on-tea-party

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pvt jet from semiconductor 

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/tea-party-donor-patriot-one-raymon-thompson