IWF 2

1/17 node , also tag

see voices 501c4 bs (long claim non-partisan but FUND gop

3-4 shuffle [pass thru to CFG?]

see heather higgins

FLAVOR VAPE KIDS

CAPT 722

~ transgender

---

pjt 2025 also mandy g epa chapter

omg

Gabriella Hoffman • 3rd+

Policy Analyst, Freelance Journalist, Award-Winning Outdoor Writer & Podcaster

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R-WY) on a wide range of energy, natural resources, and conserv

https://www.linkedin.com › in › gabbyhoffman

Independent Women is hosting a national security briefing on Russia’s war in Ukraine this Wednesday, June 10th, in DC. My colleague Meaghan Mobbs, PhD, who leads our Center for American Safety and Security, has assembled an incredible lineup and agenda then.

---

Independent Women's Forum 5 yrs

[Director - Center for Energy and Conservation Full-time

Nov 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 8 mos

Alexandria, Virginia, United States · Remote](https://www.linkedin.com/company/116661/)

Starting November 1st, 2023, I'll oversee IWF’s Center for Energy and Conservation (CEC). Our center will reshape the conversation about American energy and conservation. The center will educate the public about the benefits of modern energy, including thriving economies and healthy communities. The center will also level-set fear-based rhetoric surrounding the climate and cultivate meaningful policies that lead to cleaner air, cleaner water, and a lower-emissions future. Importantly, the center will connect the role our modern energy industry has played in successful environmental outcomes and a better, more prosperous way of life.

[Senior Fellow Freelance

Jun 2022 - Nov 2023 · 1 yr 6 mos

Washington DC-Baltimore Area · Remote](https://www.linkedin.com/company/116661/)

I'm a senior fellow at Independent Women's Forum focusing on energy/conservation, ESG, and small business/independent contracting.

[Visiting Fellow Jul 2021 - Jun 2022 · 1 yr

Washington DC-Baltimore Area](https://www.linkedin.com/company/116661/)

Starting June 1, 2022, I'll begin a new role with IWF as a Senior Fellow. From July 2021 until May 31st, 2022, I served as a Visiting Fellow with the organizion focusing on economics/flexible work/small business and energy/environment. Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to developing and advancing policies that aren’t just well-intended, but actually enhance people’s freedom, opportunities, and well-being. As a 501c3 non profit organization, IWF works every day to engage and inform women about how policy issues impact them and their loved ones. IWF celebrates women’s accomplishments and fights to expand women’s options and opportunities. We support policies that reduce government red tape and return resources and control to people, so that we have healthy communities and people can pursue their own visions of happiness.… more

:{[

---

:{[

[Self Employed 10 yrs

Remote](https://www.linkedin.com/company/33200573/)

[Part-Time Freelance Journalist, Podcaster, Media Strategist Part-time

Nov 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 8 mos

Alexandria, Virginia, United States](https://www.linkedin.com/company/33200573/)

[Freelance Media Strategist & Journalist Jul 2016 - Nov 2023 · 7 yrs 5 mos

Washington DC-Baltimore Area](https://www.linkedin.com/company/33200573/)

I'm a media strategist and consultant. I work specifically with conservative, outdoor/shooting sports, and small business clients. If you're looking to create content strategy, beef up your social media efforts, get pitched onto radio/TV, or want to host trainings, I hope you can consider me for the job. Email me at gabriella@gabriellahoffman.com.… more

[

Gabriella Hoffman's Resume](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabbyhoffman/overlay/Position/879334204/treasury/?profileId=ACoAAASSTTwBwp6Y__bX7GXyxA8HEYhHlI-E0AU)

---

[Freelance Columnist Townhall Media · Freelance

May 2020 - Present · 6 yrs 2 mos

Washington DC-Baltimore Area](https://www.linkedin.com/company/10395310/)

I have returned to Townhall.com as a freelance columnist and will be publishing 1-2 columns a week. I previously contributed columns from 2013-2016.

Townhall.com Column — Gabriella Hoffman

---

Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA) 7 yrs 9 mos

[Second Vice President Jul 2025 - Present · 1 yr

Washington DC-Baltimore Area · Remote](https://www.linkedin.com/company/243016/)

Starting July 1st, I'll be second vice president at POMA.

[Voting Media Member Oct 2019 - Present · 6 yrs 9 mos

Alexandria, Virginia, United States](https://www.linkedin.com/company/243016/)

I just won a three-year term on our Board of Directors from June 2021 until June 2024. I also serve as Secretary.

[Board of Director / Secretary Jun 2021 - Jun 2025 · 4 yrs 1 mo

Washington DC-Baltimore Area](https://www.linkedin.com/company/243016/)

[Associate Media Member Oct 2018 - Oct 2019 · 1 yr 1 mo

Washington DC-Baltimore Area](https://www.linkedin.com/company/243016/)

Previously an Associate Media Member from October 2018-October 2019.

---

[2025 Fellow Club for Growth Foundation

Jan 2025 - Dec 2025 · 1 yr

Alexandria, Virginia, United States · Remote](https://www.linkedin.com/company/77017621/)

I'm one of 50 participants in the Club for Growth Foundation's yearlong 2025 Fellowship Program Class. https://clubforgrowthfoundation.org/fellow/gabriella-hoffman/… more

---

Show all

Education

[UC San Diego BA, Political Science

2009 – 2012](https://www.linkedin.com/school/3382/)

Activities and societies: Young Americans for Freedom, Tritons for Israel, The California Review

I graduated from UCSD with a B.A. in Political Science and minor in History in June 2012 with a 3.24 GPA.

---

Tesoro High School

HS Diploma

2005 – 2009

Grade: 4.4 GPA

Activities and societies: Young Republicans, National Honor Society, JV/Varsity Tennis, Working Wardrobes

Gabriella Hoffman - Policy Analyst, Freelance Journalist ... - LinkedIn

Prior to launching her freelancing media consulting business and joining IWF full-time, Gabriella served as a Regional Field Coordinator at The Leadership Institute from August 2012-July 2016.

gabriellahoffman.com

https://gabriellahoffman.com › category › iwf

IWF Archives - Gabriella Hoffman

Gabriella Hoffman RFDTV Appearance - October 5th, 2023 CFACT, District of Conservation Podcast, IWF, Media / By Gabriella Hoffman

iwvoice.com

https://www.iwvoice.com › people › gabriella-hoffman

Gabriella Hoffman | Independent Women's Voice

Gabriella Hoffman is the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women's Forum and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women's Voice.

x.com

https://x.com › Gabby_Hoffman

Gabriella Hoffman (@Gabby_Hoffman) / Posts / X - x.com

Gabriella Hoffman (@Gabby_Hoffman) - Posts - @IWF Center for Energy & Conservation Director. @cfact Policy Analyst & Host. 🖊 @townhallcom .🎙... | X (formerly Twitter)

Townhall

https://townhall.com › columnists › gabriellahoffman

Articles by Gabriella Hoffman - Townhall

Articles by Gabriella Hoffman Gabriella Hoffman is Director of IWF's Center for Energy and Conservation, a CFACT Senior Policy Analyst, award-winning writer, and freelance media strategist ...

anglingright.substack.com

https://anglingright.substack.com › p › meet-gabriella

Meet Gabriella - by Gabriella Hoffman - Angling Right

Meet Gabriella Gabriella Hoffman is a freelance media strategist, policy analyst, journalist, award-winning writer, and Townhall.com political columnist. As of November 2023, Gabriella serves as Director of Independent Women's Forum's Center for Energy and Conservation.

CFG Foundation

https://clubforgrowthfoundation.org › fellow › gabriella-hoffman

Gabriella Hoffman - CFG Foundation

Gabriella Hoffman is the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women. She is a freelance media strategist, award-winning writer, and Townhall.com political columnist.

---

ORIGIN: women for thomas;

IWF Board Chair Heather R. Higgins has held senior positions in numerous right-wing foundations, including the Randolph Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Philanthropy Roundtable.

Kellyanne Conway, White House advisor and former Trump campaign manager, is an IWF board member. Directors Emeritae include Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney and Kimberly O. Dennis, president of the board of directors of Donors Trust and president and CEO of Searle Freedom Trust.

Nancy M. Pfotenhauer, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, left Koch Industries to become president of IWF in 2001 and she later served as Vice Chairman of IWF’s Board of Directors. She has a long history of promoting dirty energy and pushing for deregulation of polluting industries.

---

-=-=

VAPE

an 8 26

At the core of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s rise as a political celebrity is the enduring American reverence for his family. Decades ago, during his career as an environmental advocate, that lingering aura inspired admiration and even hope.

Yet the longer Bobby Jr. remains in the corrupting orbit of this regime and its maximum leader, the more he has come to reflect the degraded values and morals of the Trump family rather than his own.

Flawed as the legendary Kennedys were, nobody has ever thought of Jack, Robert or Teddy as low-rent grifters seeking to scam the government or the public for personal gain. Quite the opposite, since they devoted their political careers to protecting the American people from crooks like Roy Cohn -- the Trump lawyer and moral mentor who was twice indicted when Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was attorney general.

On the current record, it is clear that RFK Jr. has long since abandoned the illustrious example of his forebears and embraced instead the grabbing-with-both-hands ethic of his new political family. During the past year alone, Bobby has abandoned all the environmental and public health principles that supposedly animated his career for the past 40 years, strictly to enrich and promote himself and his dear leader Donald Trump (a man his father and uncles assuredly would have scorned).

Consider just one of the many abuses of power perpetrated by Bobby for his own personal and political gain. As disclosed earlier this summer in The New York Times, he went out of his way to protect the distribution of Kratom, a highly toxic, mind-bending drug, mostly sold in gas stations and convenience marts, that has been linked to thousands of deaths. Exercising his authority as Health and Human Services secretary in the fall of 2025, he called the governor of Ohio in an effort to stop a state ban on the dangerous substance. Among the Kratom producers who benefited from this action -- the opposite of what any public health official should have done -- was a man formerly known as Jerry Cash, who had served time in prison for embezzlement and later changed his surname to Ross.

As Jerry Ross, the Kratom mogul poured $162,000 into the defunct RFK Jr. 2024 presidential committee after Trump named Bobby as health secretary. And several months later, after Food and Drug Administration granted additional favors to boost kratom, Ross wrote another million-dollar check to Kennedy's MAHA PAC.

Like Trump, Kennedy has profited from blatant conflicts of interest while refusing to divest himself of those deals and arrangements. He still stands to profit from his consulting contract with a Los Angeles personal injury law firm that is suing vaccine makers such as Merck. When he was confirmed, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others objected, noting that at HHS he could use his power to increase his legal bonanza (which has brought him millions of dollars over the past few years).

And like Trump, Kennedy banks big money from his "patriotic" sloganeering, by personally licensing "Make American Healthy Again" as a brand - while he uses government resources to promote that brand. When Dr. Anthony Fauci came under fire in a Senate hearing in July, Kennedy used the opportunity to promote his scurrilous book attacking the former federal science official -- despite his previous pledge not to run that particular sleazy grift.

How much longer Kennedy will be able to exploit the naivete of the "MAHA Moms" who form his political base remains to be seen. Many of them have grown restive as he repeatedly sells out their ideals to back Trump's pay-for-play arrangements with pesticide producers, tobacco firms and other industries whose depredations he swore to fight. For the MAHA movement, a bitter realization is coming: They followed a leader named and packaged as a Kennedy, but underneath he was just another shoddy Trump.

-=-=

nyer

....Ramaswamy was also casting about for another business to start—maybe an anti-woke shoe company to compete with Nike, or an anti-woke beverage company to take on Coca-Cola. But conditions seemed more propitious for an “anti-BlackRock”—something much bigger than the anti-E.S.G. companies that had already formed.

At the time, a wave of anti-E.S.G sentiment was taking hold at the local level. States including Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Texas passed bills that allowed their officials to restrict the activities of financial institutions if they were determined to be limiting their dealings with the fossil-fuel or firearm industries. The lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, which has received funding from the billionaire Koch brothers and other allies of the fossil-fuel industry, is an enthusiastic supporter of such anti-E.S.G. endeavors. (Ramaswamy has appeared frequently at Heritage functions.)Heritage also has ties to the State Financial Officers Foundation,a group that includes conservative state treasurers and has promoted anti-E.S.G. efforts. Ramaswamy spoke to a gathering of the group this past February. A few months later, he was collaborating with one of its rising stars, Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer, on a Wall Street Journal op-ed.The piece criticized the disproportionate power of the “big three” asset managers over public companies.

Moore told me that, after he took office in January, 2021, he heard that coal, gas, and oil companies with operations in his state were struggling because some banks had made it more difficult for them to borrow money. (He declined to name any of the companies.) “I immediately started to dig in and wonder about how we could push back,” Moore said. West Virginia was one of the country’s largest energy producers, with some seventy-two thousand workers in the sector, and the industry generated millions of dollars in revenue for the state. Moore wrote to Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and U.S. Bank, warning that they might lose state contracts should they be found to be boycotting fossil fuels.

“Everybody talks about climate change, and I get what they’re saying—maybe the climate is changing,” Moore said. “But it misses what’s measurably changing drastically in this country, and that is the question of human flourishing. We see people’s life expectancy dropping, drug addiction, people generationally doing worse than their grandparents or parents were doing. That is a huge problem, one that has to be addressed more immediately than the question of the climate changing. Here in West Virginia, that is a rich man’s problem.”

:{:{}:

Moore added that today some West Virginia coal miners make ninety thousand dollars a year. Meanwhile, small towns and local businesses have been “gutted” by Walmart. “If they take our coal-mining jobs away in certain parts of this state, the only jobs we have left are in Walmarts,” he said. “And that’s not living.”

Some states that pass anti-E.S.G. legislation could face a new set of economic difficulties, according to a recent study by Daniel Garrett, an assistant professor of finance at Wharton, and Ivan Ivanov, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They found that in Texas five banks paused or halted their underwriting of municipal bonds after anti-E.S.G. laws were adopted in September, 2021. The experts’ estimate suggests that a loss of competition in the market cost Texas municipalities an additional three to five hundred million dollars in interest on bonds in the first eight months.

Earlier this month, the anti-E.S.G. movement gained ground in unexpected territory. Vanguard withdrew from a large climate-finance alliance, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which aims to encourage fund companies to reach net-zero carbon targets by 2050. The company, which had been under pressure from Republican politicians, stated that it would track its own climate progress instead. Critics immediately accused the company of giving in to the anti-woke movement. Ramaswamy filed the news away as another victory.

He was also gratified, this fall, by the response to a public letter he’d sent the C.E.O. of Chevron, urging him to reject calls by BlackRock and other institutional shareholders to reduce carbon emissions and to increase investments in renewable energy. When I met Ramaswamy for dinner one night in Manhattan at his favorite Mexican restaurant, he told me he’d be meeting later that evening with Chevron’s C.F.O. Ramaswamy seemed exhilarated by the thought that he, like Larry Fink, could start telling business leaders what to do.

He’d been on a round of speaking engagements and was in the city with his body man to promote, among other things, a new book with a self-explanatory title: “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.” As he tore into a plate of quesadillas with huitlacoche, I asked Ramaswamy if his burgeoning reputation as a conservative firebrand had taken a personal toll. He chose his words carefully. A family member no longer spoke to him, and he’d been ghosted by a close friend. Although he’d forged new relationships with conservatives, none of the connections had turned into friendships. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he said.

Although Ramaswamy delights in the visibility that his Fox News appearances bring, he wonders about the opportunities foreclosed.“I feel like I recoil when I see someone describe me as a conservative,” Ramaswamy said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a conservative. It’s just not how I would describe myself.”

Fear of the label did not stop Ramaswamy from travelling to Washington, D.C., a few weeks later to receive the Gentleman of Distinction Award at the annual gala of a right-leaning organization called the Independent Women’s Forum. The unofficial theme of the event, which took place in the great hall of a museum, seemed to be outrage about transgender athletes in women’s sports. Still, the mood in the room was exuberant. The midterms were imminent, and Republicans were anticipating big gains.

Ramaswamy had flown in from an investment conference in Las Vegas, where he had been interviewed alongside Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, at an event entitled “ESG for Thee, China for Me.” Somewhere along the way, he had upgraded his footwear to black brogues, and when he took the stage he delivered a speech less folksy than the one he’d tried out months earlier, in Dublin. He shared his child-of-immigrants story; quoted Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.; slammed E.S.G. and tech censorship; and then got to the self-mythologizing portion of the narrative—that he had stepped down from his company, where he’d been working to develop a cancer drug, to fight a new kind of cancer afflicting our culture.

---

see new legal arm: Independent Women's Law Center IWLC

documented

TO:

RE: GOP Senate Members Suggested SCOTUS Talking Points

DATE: February 24, 2022

Because this nominee is likely to be a woman of color, the Left will try to portray any opposition to confirmation as sexist and/or racist. Do not allow them to do this by suggesting that the president’s selection process led him to choose someone who may not be “the best person” for the job. The truth is, there is no “best person” for the job. When President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was no more or less qualified than any of the other judges on President Trump’s short list, all of whom would have made terrific justices (and one of whom, Amy Coney Barrett, was eventually nominated to the Court).

It is, therefore, important that you focus NOT on the selection process or on the nominee’s paper qualifications, but rather on the need to learn more about the nominee’s judicial philosophy. Consider saying: This nominee has impressive paper credentials. But beyond resumes, the most important qualification for a justice is commitment to the rule of law. The best way to tell whether a judge will be impartial and apply the law as written is to examine her judicial philosophy and her views about the role of the Court in a democratic society.

We need to see evidence that this nominee will leave politics to the politicians and not try to rewrite our Constitution or the statutes passed by Congress to fit her own personal conceptions of justice. In explaining why this is important, you can appeal to the concerns of some Americans (particularly women and swing voters) that their rights hang in the balance with every Supreme Court nomination. Remind voters that the Court can become dangerous if filled with unelected justices willing to impose their own morals from on high...

---

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/01/roe-amazon-google-facebook-independent-womens-forum/

wHEN THE Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the country’s top internet companies quickly responded with commitments to help employees in states that moved to ban abortion. In an implicit signal of support for abortion rights, the companies said they would help those employees seek abortions in states where the procedure remains legal.

In the years leading up to the seismic reproductive rights decision, however, the tech giants sponsored a controversial group that’s worked tirelessly to put the Supreme Court under conservative control, setting the stage for Roe’s reversal.

The Independent Women’s Forum traces its origins back to the 1991 fight to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. Since then, the group has expanded into promoting a litany of perennial right-wing causes like climate denial, immigration alarmism, and deregulation, but a conservative-dominated Supreme Court remained a focus.

public relations plays a key role in its operation. With savvy self-branding as a pro-woman organization, the group fought for the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. The IWF couched support for Brett Kavanaugh as good feminism and any opposition to Amy Coney Barrett as sexism — despite well-founded concerns that their ascensions to the court would spell the end of Roe. The IWF wields a skillful mix of media placement, op-eds, television punditry, and other contributions to the conservative content ecosystem.

The group also takes advantage of quieter influence peddling as well. In 2020, IWF chief and Vicks VapoRub heiress Heather Higgins boasted to a closed audience of Virginia conservatives about how instrumental the group was in rallying congressional support for Kavanaugh’s nomination. Higgins told the group that the IWF circulated a confidential strategy memo on the Hill. “Most important,” Higgins said, “Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” referring to the Republican senator from Maine.

The Dark Money-Funded Women’s Group Rallying Behind Amy Coney Barrett

Independent Women’s Forum and its sister organization, Independent Women’s Voice, draw on donations from right-wing financial mainstays like the Koch brothers, but in recent years the groups have enjoyed financial support from Facebook’s parent company, Meta; Google; and Amazon. In 2017, Google sponsored an IWF gala at the “gold” donor level, according to brochures provided to The Intercept by True North Research, a progressive watchdog group. Other brochures show that Meta (which at the time still using the name Facebook) sponsored IWF galas in 2018, alongside Google, and 2019. Honorees at IWF events have included notable anti-abortion figures like Rep. Lynne Cheney, R-Wy.; top Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway; and Vice President Mike Pence.

Corporate disclosures from Amazon show that the company donated undisclosed sums to the IWF in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Amazon, Google, Meta, and the IWF did not respond to a request for comment.

True North founder Lisa Graves characterized the IWF’s efforts as an attempt to launder conservative ideology. “They act as a distaff,” she said in an interview, “in essence providing a woman’s face for the right wing’s critique or attack on progressives and its advance of this extreme and regressive, repressive agenda.”

dESPITE THE PUBLIC perception of Silicon Valley’s alignment with progressive values and liberal causes, tech companies, particularly those fearing state regulation, have long funneled money to right-wing groups like the IWF. At the same time, the IWF routinely pushes policy positions that are highly favorable to its corporate donors.

The IWF has consistently espoused tech industry-friendly positions on labor, antitrust, and other issues, without disclosing its donors’ interests. Take, for example, an April IWF blog post that warned that antitrust enforcement against Big Tech would prove disastrous. “Tech innovation has been nothing short of miraculous over the past few decades,” wrote Patrice Onwuka,director of IWF’s Center for Economic Opportunity and its go-to defender of powerful tech firms.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe End of Roe

Few issues in tech have galvanized the IWF and Onwuka like the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would block tech companies from leveraging their enormous reach to favor their own services over competitors. In a December 2021 piece titled “Amazon Prime may not be around to save the day next Christmas,” Onwuka claimed, “Senator Amy Klobuchar and others are on a path to end services like Prime’s fast and free shipping and other services that we depend upon.” Onwuka then linked to a blog post by the Amazon-funded Chamber of Progress that claimed, dubiously, that the law would “ban Amazon Prime.”

In June, Onwuka wrote a jeremiad against congressional antitrust efforts:“The conveniences that make life and work easier and faster and save consumers money may disappear.” Later that day, Onwuka appeared on Fox Business, again protesting antitrust enforcement against the tech industry. “I’m more worried about the impact on small business owners and on women and families that rely on some of the benefits that some of these big four tech companies provide,” she said.

While shielding Big Tech from antitrust scrutiny has proven a priority for the IWF, the group also stands up directly for its benefactors. In 2019, Onwuka wrote an entire post dedicated sticking up for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Politico reported that he had attended dinners with notable conservative commentators and lawmakers. “Zuckerberg is a private citizen who can eat dinner with whomever he wants,” Onwuka wrote. “His dinner has a clear business purpose and that’s part of doing business.”

“Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position. But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

The cordial treatment of industry giants is of course a linchpin of conservatism, and the IWF would almost certainly be warning that antitrust will bring us back to the Bronze Age even without Google sponsoring its gala dinners. But fueling the right-wing punditry mill is a large, ever-expanding facet of Big Tech’s political strategy.

While there’s no evidence that Zuckerberg or Google CEO Sundar Pichai have any personal opposition to abortion access, their companies no doubt benefit from their support of a broad, thriving conservative discourse ecosystem in which any government regulation is anathema. For tech company leadership, the reality that this ecosystem pushes not just Facebook-friendly laissez-faire economics, but also climate denial and abortion bans is considered a perhaps unfortunate but worthwhile byproduct.

Silicon Valley’s patronage of right-wing think tanks and campaigns is an arrangement in which there is ample plausible deniability to go around. When The Guardian reported in 2019 that Google was donating to some of the nation’s most notorious climate-denial organizations, a company spokesperson retorted, “We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organizations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy.”

The multitude of topics on which the IWF engages, and its careful avoidance of publicly opposing abortion access have helped it avoid a reputation as an anti-abortion group. “Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position,” explained Graves, of True North. “But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

---

judd 5 23

on April 27, the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature overrode Governor Laura Kelly’s (D) veto to pass a law that legally defines an individual’s sex as “an individual’s sex at birth, either male or female.” The law, referred to as a “Women’s Bill of Rights,” defines a female as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.”

The new law in Kansas is the most high-profile success of a well-financed and systematic campaign to establish anti-trans policies across the country. It is being coordinated by a secretive group that has consistently opposed policies that protect and expand women's rights.

The law states that “with respect to biological sex, separate accommodations are not inherently unequal” and that “distinctions between the sexes [are to] be considered substantially related to… protecting the health, safety, and privacy of individuals” in certain spaces. The spaces include restrooms, domestic violence centers, rape crisis centers, lockerrooms, and athletic facilities.

The new law attempts to erase transgender individuals by excluding them from spaces deemed as “women only.” “The Kansas bill would certainly be among the most restrictive ones that we’ve seen in the country — one of the most expansive, one of the most extreme and really just one of the most mean spirited and hurtful,” ACLU of Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic said, according to Politico.

The original bill, SB 180, was based on model legislation written by the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) in collaboration with the Independent Women’s Law Center and Women's Liberation Front. The IWV is the action arm of the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a dark money group that claims to fight to “expand women’s options and opportunities.”

The IWF website states that the group is an “educational” non-profit “dedicated to developing and advancing policies that aren’t just well intended, but actually enhance freedom, opportunities, and well-being.” But while the group publicly claims to be non-partisan, it has extensive right-wing ties. In 2016, CEO of IWV and Chairman of IWF Heather R. Higgins admitted in a speech, “Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you’re actually conservatives puts us in a unique position.”

In March 2022, the IWV introduced the model legislation for a “women’s bill of rights” and called for legislation to “protect biological sex as a distinct legal category,” stating that the “basic definition” of “woman” has “come under fire in recent years by activists who dispute the biological basis of womanhood.” According to the IWF website, the “women’s bill of rights” was introduced to “counter transgender ideology.”

On April 27, the group celebrated the passing of Kansas’ new law, stating that it protects “women’s rights to privacy, safety, and equal opportunity.” The statement continued to say that the law will “prevent judges, unelected bureaucrats, and administrators in Kansas from unilaterally redefining the word ‘woman’ to mean anyone who ‘identifies as a woman.’”

IWF/V is now fighting for similar legislation to be passed across the country.Similar bills have already been introduced in multiple states, including Montana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and North Dakota. In 2022, a federal bill was also introduced and sponsored by Representative Debbie Lesko (R-AZ). The bill was reintroduced by Lesko and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) in February 2023.

While the IWF/V touts themselves as a group that fights for women’s rights, the reality is that the group has spent decades opposing substantive policies to protect and expand women’s rights.

IWF's fight against women's rights

According to the book Righting Feminism, IWF was formed in 1992 out of the coalition Women for Judge Thomas, a group that supported Justice Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court, despite the allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill. Since then, the group has vehemently opposed legislation to advance and protect women’s rights, including the Equal Rights Amendment, the fight for equal pay, Title IX, child care investments, and comprehensive paid leave, according to research provided to Popular Information by True North Research.

The Equal Rights Amendment is a “proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex” and “seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women.” An article published in January 2020 on IWF’s website argues that the Equal Rights Amendment would “replace equality with enforced sameness” and that the amendment would “add nothing to the equality under the law women already enjoy in America.” The article states, “[t]oday, men possess no legal rights that women do not, and no one imagines that women do not have the right to free speech, religious liberty, or due process as outlined in the Constitution.” The article concludes that passing the Equal Rights Amendment would have “devastating consequences.”

In April 2012, IWF also published an article stating that the claim that women are paid less than men is “false” and that there is “no evidence that women are routinely paid a fraction of what men make for the same work, or that discrimination drives statistical differences between men and women’s earnings.” The piece argues that “[f]eminist groups disserve women by promoting the false idea that the U.S. workplace is overwhelmingly sexist” and that “[w]omen are better off understanding that it’s the decisions they make— not systematic sexism—that determine how much they earn.”

The claim that there is no gender wage gap is false.According to the Pew Research Center, in 2022, “women earned an average of 82% of what men earned,” which is “similar to where the pay gap stood in 2002, when women earned 80% as much as men.”

The group has also fought to deregulate childcare facilities and opposed the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) legislation and its proposed expanded access to child care. According to True North Research, IWF spent “an estimated $20,000 in Facebook ads” opposing BBB’s expanded child care legislation. IWF has also opposed attempts to expand paid family leave and paid sick leave.

Who funds IWF?

Since as early as 1998, IWF has received extensive funding from non-profit groups controlled by right-wing billionaire and Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch.

The group received $100,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2019, $150,000 from the Charles Koch Institute in 2021, and $50,000 from Americans for Prosperity in 2021 – bringing the total amount of contributions from Koch-controlled organizations to over $1,125,000.

The group’s leadership has also historically had a cozy relationship with the Koch network. Former IWF president and CEO Nancy Pfotenhauer, for instance, was once “Koch Industries’ top lobbyist in DC” and managed the company’s PAC activities.

In 2003, IWF announced that it would be formally partnering with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, sharing “staff and resources.” As a result of this new agreement, Pfotenhauer would become the president of both Americans for Prosperity and IWF, and report to David Koch, now deceased. Eventually, when Pfotenhauer stepped down as president and left IWF’s board, another former Koch lobbyist was placed on IWF's board.

The Center for Media and Democracy reports that “no fewer than half of the Independent Women’s Forum’s full-time staff previously worked directly for Koch-controlled groups or for entities that received Koch funding.” IWF’s current chairman, Higgins, is a longtime Koch operative. She was previously the director and secretary at the Koch-affiliated Center to Protect Patient Rights, and has fundraised for Koch groups over the years.

:{:{}:

---

Independent Women's Law Center Wrote Republican Senators' KBJ Talking Points, Distributed Before She Was Even Nominated

PUBLISHED ON MARCH 21, 2022

Talking points from the Independent Women's Law Center, a project of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), and its sister organization Independent Women's Voice (IWV). The document was distributed to Republican members of the U.S. Senate, and is dated February 24, 2022, the day before Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.

The talking points urge Republican Senators to attack the "judicial philosophy" of the at that time unnamed nominee.

Erin Hawley is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women's Law Center, and is the wife of Senator Josh Hawley, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The name on the bottom of the document isVictoria Coley, a former Fox News producer.

IWF's past funders have included theJudicial Crisis Network,Rush Limbaugh, Facebook, Juul, and Marathon Petroleum Corporation. It has also received millions of dollars from the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, which was founded by Leonard Leo. Both IWF and IWV also receive substantial support through Donors Trust, which has been described as the "Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement."

---

logo looks like fem hyg product?

https://iwlc.org/

---

an maya 1 23

For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly funded, initiated, and supported efforts to dismantle democracy in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.

Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively spent more than $1 billion on the 2020 election.

One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.

Soon after the election, Koch released Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”

The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.

But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.

Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.

The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.

Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.

Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.

MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”

Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.

---

origin of IWF [trump, kavanaugh?]

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/04/clarence_thomas_female_supporters_in_the_iwf.html

Confirmation Bias

:{:{}:

How “Women for Judge Thomas” turned into a conservative powerhouse.}:

By Barbara Spindel

clarence thomas anita hill.

Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her is credited for ushering in the Year of the Woman. But it also has another, less visible legacy.

Right on the heels of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson, the HBO film Confirmation offers another opportunity to relive a depressing ’90s spectacle—in this case, Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearings. Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her, and her poor treatment at the hands of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, are often credited with raising awareness of the issue of workplace sexual harassment and ushering in the so-called Year of the Woman, the 1992 election of four women to the Senate. (Confirmation premieres April 16 and stars Scandal’s Kerry Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas.)

But the Thomas hearings have another, less visible legacy. A small group of prominent Washington women rallied around the nominee; they were headed by the late Ricky Silberman, a friend of Thomas’ who, like Hill, had worked with him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Calling themselves Women for Judge Thomas, they pointedly demonstrated that not all women, simply by virtue of their sex, were ready to don an “I Believe Anita Hill” pin.This ad-hoc bunch—which included Anita Blair, Barbara Ledeen, and the late Barbara Olson—went on to form the Independent Women’s Forum, a D.C. nonprofit devoted to waging war on mainstream feminism.

[Stills of Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce in Confirmation.

Kerry Washington as Anita Hill and Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas in Confirmation.]

Back in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies had whipped up fears of unisex public bathrooms and female military conscription in order to help kill the Equal Rights Amendment. After that, groups such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America railed against reproductive rights and gay rights and championed traditional gender roles. But among conservative women’s groups, the IWF was something new. If you squinted, its members—enterprising, educated professionals—looked like they could belong to the National Organization for Women. Instead, they had an extreme loathing for the feminist movement.

The IWF argued that second-wave feminism had solved the problem of sex discrimination. In a 1997 interview with now-defunct conservative magazine Insight, Blair, who was by then IWF president, said that current feminists were “playing out their own Freudian drama on the policy stage, saying, ‘Well, my first husband walked out on me, or I never had dates in high school, so all men are bad.’ ” A 1997 IWF press release called National Pay Inequity Awareness Day “a cruel hoax … designed to brainwash girls and young women into believing that they are victims.”

The IWF’s Elizabeth Larson, in the organization’s Women’s Quarterly magazine, called sexual harassment an issue drummed up by “a growing number of women, many spurred on by Anita Hill’s example … [who] find it more profitable to litigate than to work.”After the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act—spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden in what was widely seen as atonement for his mishandling of the Thomas hearings—the IWF argued that the legislation should be repealed or receive zero funding; IWF spokeswoman (and ’90s right-wing It Girl) Laura Ingraham referred to VAWA as feminist “pork” with a “tear-jerker” title. The group also took on affirmative action, headlining a Women’s Quarterly article on the topic “That’s No White Male, That’s My Husband”—a phrase that revealed a lot about IWF constituents’ racial identities and loyalties. (“You can’t have white guys saying you don’t need affirmative action,” Ledeen told the Washington Post when asked why the anti-feminist IWF had organized as women in the first place.)

Get Slate in your inbox.

[Laura Ingraham appears with Sen. George Allen at a fundraiser on Oct. 7, 2006, in Maidens, Virginia.

In 1995, NOW President Patricia Ireland, in a considerable understatement, called it “a little startling” that the new and tiny conservative upstart IWF, with fewer than 2,000 members, was garnering media coverage to rival that of Ireland’s mass-membership organization. It surely helped that stalwart right-wing donors including Richard Scaife and the Koch brothers were funding the IWF, and that its well-connected roster included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman (and wife of Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney, Who Stole Feminism? author Christina Hoff Sommers, neoconservative writer (and wife of Norman Podhoretz) Midge Decter, and Wendy Lee Gramm and Mary Ellen Bork, married, respectively, to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

Hill was often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.

While much of the IWF’s campaign against feminism was waged in the media, the group also took the fight to Capitol Hill; the IWF testified before Congress against the Violence Against Women Act and affirmative action, and filed amicus briefs opposing the enforcement of Title IX and the coeducation of the Virginia Military Institute.

After the election of George W. Bush, the IWF’s clout grew as its members received posts within the new administration, among them Elaine Chao as labor secretary, Diana Furchtgott-Roth as chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Blair as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. Most absurdly, twoIWF members, then-president Nancy Pfotenhauerand board member Margot Hill, were appointed to the administration’s National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.

Despite engaging in serious business, the IWF’s spokeswomen never appeared to take themselves too seriously; they loved to bait feminists but always with a smile. Blair said, “There’s a telltale way to find a liberal feminist: It’s the nasty wrinkles around her mouth that she gets from frowning. You’ll probably find my side with laugh lines.” “We have no angry agenda,” Grace Paine Terzian, then publisher of Women’s Quarterly, told a journalist in 1995. When Wendy Kaminer wrote on right-wing challenges to feminism in the American Prospect the following year, the IWF’s Elizabeth Lurie responded in a letter to the editor that she had found the piece “howlingly funny.” All of this forced cheer was intended to highlight the contrast between the IWF’s anti-feminism and its caricatured version of feminism, which, according toHoff Sommers in a 1996 60 Minutes profile of the IWF, had come to mean “that you’re chronically offended, that you’re looking for oppression and bias under every tree.”

Plenty of people still see Hill as fitting this description, even 25 years after the Thomas hearings. Although she accused Thomas of repeated graphic descriptions of pornographic films, including scenes of rape and bestiality, and of detailed boasts about his own sexual prowess, Hill was and is often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Indeed, IWF managing director Carrie Lukas recently described Hill’s allegations against Thomas as “rather PG-rated.”

Of course, the IWF exists not because its founders thought Hill was overreacting but because, as friends of Thomas, they thought she was lying. In the years since—when downplaying the existence and impact of sex discrimination and of gender-based crimes such as harassment, rape, and domestic violence—the IWF doesn’t suggest that all women are lying. The group has frequently suggested, however, that women who speak out about these issues are whining, and should stop playing the victim, and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense the IWF, whose current mission is to “improve the lives of Americans byincreasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty,” has ties to Thomas that are not merely personal but philosophical as well.

The women of the IWF continue to stand by Clarence Thomas, and he by them. After Silberman’s 2007 death, Thomas sat down with the group’s Michelle Bernard and Charlotte Hays to talk about his friend for the IWF newsletter. “Sometimes at IWF we are accused of being anti-women and anti-feminist, because our mantra is that all issues are women’s issues,” his interviewers noted. “I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Thomas responded, proceeding to describe his own experiences being called “traitor” and “Uncle Tom.” “When I am criticized, I take it as a compliment,” he said. “If I weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t talk about me. Don’t worry about it. You just wish them good health and do it with a smile.”

---

big trump booster

https://truenorthresearch.org/report/group-stealthily-targeted-independent-women-and-claimed-decisive-role-in-trumps-win/

True North Research has released a new report documenting how a group calling itself the “Independent Women’s Voice” used its “independent” branding to target women in Wisconsin in the weeks before the 2016 election. The group claimed it played a decisive role in moving women toward Trump, citing a double-digit shift in polling. What role will it and its leader, Heather Higgins, play in targeting Wisconsin and other swing states in 2020?

Read the full report below or open the documenthere:

https://truenorthresearch.org/reports/

https://truenorthresearch.org/report/group-stealthily-targeted-independent-women-and-claimed-decisive-role-in-trumps-win/

A Report by Lisa Gravesand Evan Vorpahl

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a 501(c)(3), and the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), its (c)(4), claim to have played a pivotal role in the 2016 election of Donald Trump by targeting independent women in Wisconsin. IWF/V is positioned to play a significant role there, and elsewhere, in 2020. IWF and IWV have jointly spent millions in recent years to influence the outcome of federal and state elections. Wisconsin is a key state where they have focused their resources. Due to gaps in reporting requirements and changes in the law, the activities of IWF/V are not well known to outsiders. What Heather Higgins—IWF/V’s strategic leader and lead fundraiser—tells potential donors and allies, however, is that IWF/V’s activities have often been decisive in elections, including in Wisconsin in 2016 specifically. IWF/V’s specialty is using its “independent” brand name to target people who register as “independent” voters, particularly women. Its primary tactic is to use its (c)(3) to reach out to targets in a state with relatively detailed messaging about a particular issue, repeatedly and in multiple formats, and then layer in its (c)(4) activity to connect electoral candidates to that issue right before the election.

IWF/V has devised a process of using quizzes shortly before an election to convey distorted information to voters, without tying it to a political party or a candidate (or a request for money), until the election is imminent.The quizzes it produces to influence elections have focused on IWF/V’s claims and disinformation about the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Supreme Court, paid leave, climate policy, and immigration. It is difficult to assess independently the actual effectiveness of IWF/V’s efforts to influence the outcome of the presidential and U.S. Senate races in Wisconsin in 2016, but a “confidential” document obtained by True North Research provides one professor’s assessment of IWF/V’s success.That evaluation, procured by IWF/V, takes the position that IWF/V was exceptionally successful in Wisconsin in moving independent voters to support Donald Trump and Ron Johnson, in 2016, by double-digit percentages. This special report from the new Wisconsin-based national watchdog True North Research examines IWF/V’s astounding claims of success in Wisconsin in 2016 and in other elections, as IWF/V plots its strategy to influence election outcomes in the upcoming 2020 races. Lisa Graves is the Executive Director of True North Research and a Senior Fellow at Republic Report. She previously led the Center for Media and Democracy, was the Chief Counsel for Nominations on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and a Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. She’s been a frequent guest on MSNBC and in documentary films. She directs two new research websites: KochDocs.org and IndependentWomensForum.org.

Background for Assessing IWF/V’s ClaimsIt Played a Pivotal Role for Donald Trump and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin in 2016 The popular vote in Wisconsin in 2016 was more than 1.4M for Donald Trump and 1.38M for Hillary Clinton, a difference of 22,748 votes—and a margin of less than 1% of the total votes cast. (Third party candidates received more than 188K votes cast, or 6.3%, including the 31K cast for the Green Party.) noted: “In Wisconsin alone, Americans for Prosperity staff, equipped with state-of-the-art voter contact technology, made 1.5 million phone calls and knocked on nearly 30,000 doors…. Koch groups spent $4.3 million in Wisconsin, eclipsing the $3 million spent by the Clinton campaign, with television ads that sought to simultaneously tear down Democrat Russ Feingold and Clinton, a pattern repeated in other crucial swing states.”Voting rights expert Ari Berman credited Priorities USA’s assessment that the 2016 turnout in the state was suppressed by approximately 200K votes. A narrower analysis concluded that the votes of at least 16K Americans in two of the most populous Wisconsin counties were... [That’s all part of the publicly known story about the 2016 election in Wisconsin. Here’s the part that is less well known: IWF/V, whose electoral influence operations are helmed by GOP strategist and donor Heather Higgins, claims to have played a pivotal role in Wisconsin IWV’s Claim: Without its “educational messaging, both Trump and Johnson would otherwise have lost WI by over 100,000 votes each.”]

...suppressed by Voter ID restrictions the GOP adopted after Obama’s win in 2008. The turnout in Wisconsin in 2016 was the lowest it has been since 2000.

Further complicating the assessment of who to credit with aiding Trump’s victory in the state is the documented targeting of Wisconsin and Michigan by Russian troll farms working to help Trump. Additionally, late in the campaign Brad Parscale, who was then Trump’s digital political guru, re-allocated key resources for his planned ad buys on social media away from targeting Virginia and Ohio to targeting Wisconsin and Michigan. Also, there’s the Charles Koch factor, as investigative reporter Lee Fang recently... through how she targeted independent women here. Although IWF/V is known in some DC circles as the group that got its start defending Clarence Thomas against evidence of sexual harassment and as opponents of equal pay, it has stealthily been playing a below-the-radar role in elections, with an impact it claims has been decisive. Who Did IWF/V Target in Wisconsin in 2016 and What Was Its Claimed Effect? Here is a snapshot of IWV’s “success story” about the role it says it played in delivering Wisconsin for Trump in 2016:...

---

see prez carrie lukas

https://tennesseestar.com › 2021 › 05 › 04 › independent-womens-forum-president-carrie-lukas-discusses-newsweek-piece-and-strings-attached-to-the-american-families-plan

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy - broadcast on Nashville's Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. - host Leahy welcomed President of the Independent Women's Forum Carrie Lukas to the newsmakers line to weigh in on herrecent Newsweek piece and concerns over the American Families Act proposed by Joe ...

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now,Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger [FOSTER FRIESS LOMBORG. IWF]appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’sall driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight.The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeadeclaiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”

During an interview withU.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, hostSteve Hiltondid a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with theGreen New Dea**l and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest.This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

---

heated 320

it took Maine Governor Janet Mills 12 days since the first case of novel coronavirus hit to implement the type of restrictive social distancing policies scientists overwhelmingly recommend to halt disease spread, including the closure of nonessential businesses.

It took her only five days, however, to delay the state’s ban on single-use plastic bags, using a scientifically questionable theory that reusable bags pose an outsized risk of spreading COVID-19.

Since Mills’ March 17 order, reusable grocery bags in Maine have become taboo. City officials are now discouraging shopping from bringing them to the store, claiming they will threaten grocery story workers. “According to current research and understanding, COVID-19 can survive on various surfaces for hours and in some cases days,” Portland City Manager Jon Jennings said in a news release last week.

And though Mills was the first state governor in America to give credence to this theory, she hasn’t been the last. Over the weekend, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu outright prohibited shoppers from bringing reusable bags to stores. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker did the same on Wednesday. “From now on, reusable bags are prohibited and all regulations on plastic bag bans are lifted,” he said.

This, however, is likely just the beginning of the plastic industry’s war on reusable bags. Because as the pandemic has picked up steam in America, so too has the industry’s push for policy and culture shifts to encourage single-use plastics, and ban reusable alternatives. Their allies in the news media, oil and gas industry, and conservative think tank world are all quickly lining up behind them—and together, they’re putting pressure on the public and the federal government get on board.

Last week, the Plastics Industry Association asked the Department of Health and Human Services to make a national pronouncement supporting single-use plastics and advocating against reusable grocery bags, claiming they will worsen the pandemic. “Study after study after study have shown that reusable bags can carry viruses and bacteria, spread them throughout a grocery store, and live on surfaces for up to three days,” they claimed.

But those three studies don’t actually say what the industry claims. Taken together, they do not provide sufficient evidence that reusable grocery bags pose a greater threat to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic than single-use plastic grocery bags.

Let’s go through them one by one.

1) The 10-year-old American Chemistry Council-funded study that looked at 84 reusable bags in two states and found no disease-causing bacteria

The first piece of research that the plastic industry says strongly suggests a correlation between reusable grocery bags and coronavirus spread was this 2010 study funded by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group which represents plastics interests. Conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona, it was published in the journal Food Protection Trends in 2011.

Analyzing just 84 reusable bags collected in California and Arizona, the studies authors concluded that “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half.” They did not, however, find any pathogenic bacteria or strains of E. Colithat actually make you sick. As Consumer Reports noted at the time, “They only found bacteria that don’t normally cause disease, but do cause disease in people with weakened immune systems.”

“A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study,” Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumers Union, said in the article. “These bacteria can be found lots of places, so no need to go overboard.”

The reason there was bacteria on the bags was because people didn’t wash them. If people washed the bags, the study said, 99.9 percent of all bacteria was destroyed.

2) The study that looked at 30 reusable bags and said essentially the same thing

The second study, published in the international journal*Food Control*in 2019, found microbes capable of causing food-borne illness on the bags. This time, half the bags tested had coliform bacteria on them and some even had E. coli.

This makes sense, again, because the bags had a bunch of food in them, and were not washed or sanitized. As Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist told Bustle at the time, “Reusable shopping bags, like anything, can accumulate micoorganisms from the environment. Unless the bag is visibly soiled, most of the risk is not worth worrying about.”

Of course, this means coronavirus could be on your bag, because coronavirus can live on plastic surfaces for up to 3 days. But neither of these studies indicate that it has any greater risk of being on your reusable bag than, say, your money, your phone, or your hands, which also get a lot of use at the grocery story. Nor do they indicate that reusable bags made of plastic have a greater risk of holding the virus than single-use plastic bags, which could be infected with pathogens during transportation, manufacturing, or handling.

Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University, told the Wall Street Journal something similar, when talking about how companies like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts have stopped filling customers’ reusable cups out of fear of coronavirus. “It’s drawing a pretty long bow to believe this will be meaningfully impactful,” he said. “It’s an incredibly low likelihood that the cup would be the primary vehicle for transmission to occur.”

The article added: “Coronavirus can survive for a period outside the body and is transmitted through droplets like those generated by a cough or a sneeze. If a cup is infected, its owner probably is too, said Mr. Wolfe, making handing over cash and touching door handles potentially just as risky.

“You’d have a better impact if you told customers with active coughs not to come in, or to use hand sanitizer before approaching the coffee stand,” he said.”

3) The study that looked at one reusable bag that someone had literally vomited next to in a bathroom and then gave to a group of children.

Yeah, honestly, like I can’t even go there with this one. You can read about that study here.

Also, coronavirus is not a norovirus. It is literally not the same thing.

---

No evidence, no problem

There is certainly a chance that coronavirus could live on our reusable grocery bags if those bags come in contact with an infected person—particularly if those bags are made of plastic. A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the novel coronavirus is*most*stable on plastic surfaces.

But that also includes single-use plastic surfaces, said Aaron Bernstein, the director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment. “This suggests that relying on plastic bags may be the best way to ensure the virus persists in the environment and facilitates spread of the disease.”

Clearly, there is still a debate to be had over the efficacy of plastic bag policies for coronavirus—especially since plastic bag bans in themselves are attempts to address climate change and ocean pollution, two other pressing global crises. It would be foolish to prematurely stop an attempt to address two global crises without a baseline sort of consensus that it would even remotely help the other.

The right and its allies, however, appear to have made up their minds.Energy in Depth, a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute, wrote an article claiming coronavirus will spread without more single-use plastic bags. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journalhave written editorials in support of reversing bag bans. Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative anti-climate group, is taking out ads on Facebook claiming that plastic bag bans help spread the coronavirus infectioN.

[graf twt]

it makes sense why so many right-leaning interest groups would come together on this issue. Before coronavirus, single-use plastic products were falling out of favor, as studies showed they were exacerbating climate change and destroying the ocean. Now, the industry is hoping COVID-19 will make everyone forget all that.

“As the coronavirus spreads across the country, single-use plastics will only become more vital,” Plastics Industry Association President Tony Radoszewski said in a statement last week. “We live longer, healthier, and better because of single-use plastics.”

Bernstein, however, is hoping that we remember something else. “In a crisis, we need science to guide us,” he said. “And that means science done by credible investigators who are supported by organizations without a vested financial interest in a specific outcome of their research.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/dark-money-posing-as-independent-womens-groups-might-have-played-a-pivotal-role-in-trumps-2016-win-study

no lnx

Dark money posing as ‘independent’ women’s groups might have played a ‘pivotal role’ in Trump’s 2016 win: study

Written by Alex Henderson March 2, 2020

When a political group describes itself as “independent,” it’s important to ask if that group really is “independent” or if, in fact, it has partisan leanings. The Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) and the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), which are sister organizations, both portray themselves as groups of free-thinking nonpartisan women. But David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), in an article republished by Truthout on February 28, reports that according to Truth North Research (TNR), both organizations may have played a “pivotal role” in President Donald Trump’s victory in Wisconsin in 2016 as well as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the 2012 recall election.

Armiak explains, “IWV boasts that Trump would have received an estimated 215,840 fewer votes in Wisconsin if it had not executed itsquiz messaging campaign targeting 1.54 million voters. However, much of that messaging was conducted by IWV’s affiliated 501(c)(3) partner, IWF, which is prohibited by federal law from participating or intervening in elections.”

Lisa Graves, executive director of TNR, asserts that IWV and IWF aren’t as “independent” as they claim to be. Graves told CMD, CRONON] “People in Wisconsin and elsewhere need to know about this right-wing group that uses its ‘independent’ brand name to pretend to be independentin order to sway women voters who are independent. I don’t think it would be prudent to underestimate the resolve or impact of the Independent Women’s Voice on elections.”

According to Graves, it is “troubling” that IWV is “funded largely by dark money sources.” Graves notes thatHeather Higgins, CEO of IWV and IWF, is a “touted strategist for the right wing and called the election for Trump when others were dismissing him, in part based on her assessment of independent and conservative women. I fully expect her groups to spend substantial sums deploying her quiz strategy in target states in 2020.”

The TNR report was authored by Graves and researcher Evan Vorpahl.

Armiak notes that IWV and IWF have received millions of dollars from right-wing groups, including DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund.And even though IWV and IWF claim to be “women’s organizations,” Graves’ research found that 89% of IWF’s funders are men.

The Center for Responsive Politics has noted that IWV President Tammy Bruce, in 2018, was “vociferous” in her defense of Justice Brett Kavanagh. After Kavanaugh was accused of attempted rape by Palo Alto University psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, Bruce appeared on Fox News and asserted that he was “effectively being used as a stand-in for all perpetrators.”

---

wow, anti-fem at the start w ERA schalfly, TP constant tight up to gamergate/ red pill?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/

no lnx

How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019

“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.

But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.

In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.

The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”

“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.

So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.

In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.

Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.

This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”

The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....

brett k /hist

Are Republican women ever going to get fed up? It's the question that keeps cropping up after every incident of Republican political leaders minimizing, denying or excusing sexual harassment and abuse. So far, the answer is no. Republican women did not turn on Donald Trump after a tape was released featuring him bragging about sexual assault. Republican women did not turn on the party when it backed Roy Moore's campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, despite numerous reports of him creeping on teen girls as an adult man. Now the question is being raised again, in light of the allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court.

After Thursday's hearing — when it became clear that Kavanaugh's principal accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was credible and backed by ample evidence while Kavanaugh himself appeared to lie multiple times under oath — the question arose all over again. Are Republican women finally going to wake up, realize that their party leadership sees them as second-class citizens, and fight back?

A survey of media reports suggests there's a lot of people who dearly hope so. "Here’s Why White Women Are Abandoning the GOP," blared a headline at the Atlantic.

"Republican Women Lose Faith in Kavanaugh — and Trump — After Week of Accusations," said a Morning Consult headline.

"New Poll: Kavanaugh, Trump Losing Support of Republican Women," declared New York magazine.

Other coverage, however, suggests a different story. Politico ran an article recently declaring that "party loyalty trumps #MeToo" for female Republicans. Local news covered rallies of women supporting Kavanaugh. The Associated Press ran a piece in which Republican women expressed skepticism about Ford's account and doubled down on their determination to support Republicans. Conservative pundits like Kellyanne Conway and Mollie Hemingway minimized the nature of the accusation, denying that what Ford described on worldwide live TV — being held down with her mouth covered, while an older teenage boy tried to remove her clothes — constituted assault and suggesting it was more like innocent flirting.

So what's the story here? Are Republican women getting fed up or not?

“Probably some of them are turning" on Kavanaugh, said Marjorie Spruill, a retired history professor and the author of "Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics." "But the vast majority of them, I doubt that they would, because they are committed to him on the basis of the policies that he would promote, just like they were with Trump."

Tresa Undem of the polling firm Perry Undem concurred, saying that the minority of Republican women who already disapprove of Trump will be more solidified in their distaste, but that "this is not going to have an effect" on the large majority of Republican women.

This week's polling data backs up that contention. A new CBS News poll shows that while only 29 percent of American women want Kavanaugh confirmed, a full 70 percent of Republican women want him on the bench. Even the Morning Consult poll that was being held out as evidence that Republican women were abandoning Trump and Kavanaugh didn't really show that. While there was some slippage of female Republican support, only about 15 percent of Republican women were willing to oppose Kavanaugh's confirmation — compared to 39 percent disapproval among all female voters.

Theses polls also found that Democratic and independent men were far more skeptical of Kavanaugh than Republican women -- and by wide margins.

While this might surprise casual observers, it did not surprise Undem, who told Salon, "Gender equality is very much a partisan issue," and noted that her own research has shown, over and over again, that Republican women are nearly as good at denying and minimizing sexism as Republican men. They tend to sign off on the same view that sexism isn't really a problem, but is largely something women make up to get attention or score political points.

For instance, Undem pointed out, the majority of women who voted for Trump, like the majority of men who did so, agreed with the statement, "Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist."

In a recent focus group, when Undem asked about the issue of the two parties' views on gender issues, she said she got "just blank stares" from Republican women.

This has been going on for decades, Spruill said, arguing that much of the political polarization of this moment reflects the way conservative women have aggressively organized in opposition to feminism. She pointed to the way anti-feminist women in the 1970s "redirected the Republican Party away from its traditional support for women’s rights" and shaped it into the boldly sexist party it is now.

While most of the focus of the gender fight of recent decades has been on issues like equal pay or abortion rights, Spruill observes that other questions directly relevant to the Kavanaugh case have long played a role. "Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum, for years, were opposed to a lot of what feminists said and did to try to protect women from violence, domestic abuse and sexual violence,” she said.

Schlafly's extensive history of bashing feminist efforts to prevent domestic violence and sexual abuse is still easy to find online. She railed against the Violence Against Women Act from its inception, claiming that it encouraged divorce and taught women to hate men. When Anita Hill stepped forward to accuse Clarence Thomas[--> IWF ] of sexual harassment in 1991, Schlafly argued that Hill was to blame for the harassment because she hadn't pushed back, and suggested that women in the workplace would have to learn "to thrive in a hostile environment."

The echoes of Schlafly's argument can still be heard in Laura Ingraham portraying Christine Blasey Ford as hysterical for being upset at an attempted rape or conservative legal commentator Sidney Powell describing stifling someone's screamsafter locking them in a room as "a fumbled attempt to make out with a girl at a party." Sexual abuse or assault by men and boys is treated, within this worldview, as something women must simply put up with. If women are upset or traumatized by it, that's held out as evidence that they are weak and undeserving of concern.

This kind of rhetoric is disturbing, but it is worth remembering that Republican women tend to live with Republican men. Choosing to be married to or live with men who make excuses for this sort of behavior means either getting on board — and perhaps even convincing yourself that it makes you "tough" to put up with it — or living with a degree of cognitive dissonance that is far more than most people can bear.

Undem emphasized that while most Republican women are sticking by their party and their men, however, a small percentage are getting wobbly — around 15 percent, the same proportion that now opposes Kavanaugh's confirmation. In plenty of congressional districts -- and nationally in the 2016 presidential race -- elections are won on the margins. Even a few percentage points of Republican women going sour and quitting the party in disgust could turn the electoral tide in 2018, and might make an even bigger difference when the pussy-grabber-in-chief is up for re-election in 2020.

---

Update: Article on IWF’s 25th gala in Washington DC Nov. 15, The Politics of Cancer and Infertility

The Independent Women’s Forum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has taken money from tobacco and oil companies, partners with Monsanto, defends toxic chemicals in food and consumer products, denies climate science and argues against laws that would curb the power of corporations.

IWF began in 1991 as an effort to defend now Supreme Court Justice (and former Monsanto attorney) Clarence Thomas as he faced sexual harassment charges. The group now says it seeks to “improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty.”

A key message of IWF is to shift the blame for health or environmental problems away from corporations and toward personal responsibility — for example arguing that parents, not food companies, are to blamefor America’s obesity problem.

Funding by right wing billionaires and corporations

According to data collected by Greenpeace USA, IWF has received over $15 million in funding since 1998, largely from right-wing foundations that promote deregulation and corporate free reign.

IWF’s leading contributors, with donations topping $5.3 million, are Donors Trust and Donors Capital Funds, the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement” connected with Charles and David Koch. The funds channel money from anonymous donors, including corporations, to efforts that champion corporate agendas, as a Greenpeace investigation established.

IWF’s top funder: dark money from undisclosed donors

IWF has also received $844,115 in combined donations from Koch family foundations. Other top funders include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, Randolf Foundation (an offshoot of the Richardson Foundation) and Searle Freedom Trust — all are leading funders of climate-science denial, according to a Drexel University study.

ExxonMobil and Philip Morris are among IWF’s funders, according to documents from the UCSF Tobacco Industry Documents Library. Phillip Morris named IWF in a list of “potential third party references” and “those who respect our views.”

The book “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway described IWF as one of the “seemingly grass-roots organizations” funded by the Phillip Morris Corporation that focus on “Individual Liberties,” “Regulatory Issues,” or both.

Rush Limbaugh has donated at least a quarter of a million dollars to IWF, according to this report in The Nation: “Guess Which Women’s Group Rush Limbaugh has Donated Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars to? Hint: it’s the one that defends him whenever he launches into a sexist tirade.”

IWF leaders

IWF Board Chair Heather R. Higgins has held senior positions in numerous right-wing foundations, including the Randolph Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Philanthropy Roundtable.

IWF’s agenda closely follows the lobbying and messaging agenda of tobacco, oil and chemical industry interests. Following are some examples:

Argues ‘standard Phillips Morris PR’

In August 2017, IWF lobbied FDA to approve Phillip Morris’ IQOS e-cigarettes, arguing that women need the products for various biological reasons to help them quit smoking regular cigarettes.

“Clearly, the FDA doesn’t intend to punish women, simply for their gender. Yet, that’s precisely what’s going to happen if women are limited to smoking cessation products that biologically cannot provide them with the help they need to quit traditional cigarettes,” IWF wrote.

In response to the IWF letter, Stanton Glantz, PhD,Professor of Medicine at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said: “This is standard Philip Morris PR. There is no independent confirmation that IQOS are safer than cigarettes or that they help people quit smoking.”

Denies climate science

The Independent Women’s Forum is a “Koch Industries Climate Denial Group” that “has spread misinformation on climate science and touts the work of climate deniers,” according to Greenpeace.

Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker: “The (Koch) brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.”

Opposes teaching climate science in schools

A Denver Post story reported in 2010, IWF “thinks global warming is ‘junk science’ and that teaching it is unnecessarily scaring schoolchildren.” Through a campaign called “Balanced Education for Everyone,” IWF opposed climate science education in schools, which the group described as “alarmist global warming indoctrination.”

IWF President Carrie Lucas writes about the “growing skepticism about climate change” and argues “the public could pay dearly for the hysteria.”

Promotes toxic chemicals / Partners with Monsanto

IWF is a leading messenger for promoting toxic chemicals as nothing to worry about, opposing public health protections and trying to build trust for corporations like Monsanto. According to IWF’s “Culture of Alarmism” project, sharing information about hazardous chemicals in consumer products leads to “wasted tax dollars, higher costs and inferior goods for consumers, fewer jobs … and a needlessly worried, less free American populace.”

In February 2017, Monsanto partnered with IWF on an event titled “Food and Fear: How to Find Facts in Today’s Culture of Alarmism,” and an IWF podcast that month discussed “How Monsanto is Vilified by Activists.”

IWF pushes the talking points of Monsanto and the agrichemical industry: promoting GMOs and pesticides, attacking the organic industry and opposing transparency in food labels. Examples include:

Vermont’s GMO labeling law is stupid. (The Spectator)
Sinister GMO labeling will cause grocery costs to skyrocket. (IWF)
Anti-GMO hype is the real threat to the well being of families. (National Review)
General Mills caved in to the “food police” by removing GMOs (USA Today)
Chipotle is stuffing their non-GMO burritos with nonsense. (IWF)
Reasonable moms need to push back on the mom shaming and guilt tripping organic food narrative. (IWF podcast)
GMO critics are cruel, vain, elite and seek to deny those in need. (New York Post)
Educates celebrity moms about GMOs with Monsanto’s talking points (IWF)

Champions corporate-friendly “food freedom”

IWF attacks the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as “government nannies,” for example describing the agency as “food Marxists” and “completely out of control” for issuing voluntary guidance to food manufacturers to cut sodium levels.

A June 2017 IWF event tried to stoke fears about public health guidance

In 2012, IWF launched a “Women for Food Freedom” project to “push back on the nanny state and encourage personal responsibility” for food choices. The agenda included opposing “food regulations, soda and snack food taxes, junk science and food and home-product scares, misinformation about obesity and hunger, and other federal food programs, including school lunches.”

On obesity, IWF tries to shift attention away from corporate accountability and toward personal choices. In this interview with Thom Hartmann, Julie Gunlock of IWF’s Culture of Alarmism Project argues that corporations are not to blame for America’s obesity problem but rather “people are making bad choices and I think parents are completely checking out.” The solution, she said, is for parents to cook more, especially poor parents since they have a worse problem with obesity.

Attacks moms for trying to reduce pesticide exposures

IWF pushes industry messaging, using covert tactics, in attempt to ostracize moms who are concerned about pesticides; a prime example is this 2014 New York Post article, “Tyranny of the Organic Mommy Mafia” by Naomi Schafer Riley.

Under the guise of complaining about “mom shaming,” Riley – who is an IWF fellow but did not disclose that to readers – attempts to shame and blame moms who choose organic food.

Riley’s article relied on information from industry front groups that she falsely presented as independent sources:

Riley described Academics Review – a front group funded by the agrichemical industry and started with the help of Monsanto to attack the organic industry and critics of GMOs – as “a nonprofit group of independent scientists.”
Riley used the Alliance for Food and Farming, a food industry front group, to counter “the most common mommy worry — pesticides” with the message that pesticides are nothing to worry about.
A key source, Julie Gunlock, was identified as an author but not as an employee of IWF and Riley’s colleague.

Partners with chemical industry front groups

IWF partners with other corporate front groups such as the American Council on Science and Health, a leading defender of toxic chemicals with deep ties to Monsanto and Syngenta. ACSH is funded by chemical, pharmaceutical, tobacco and other industry groups.

In a February 2017 IWF podcast, ACSH and IWF “debunked Rachel Carson’s alarmism on toxic chemicals”
ACSH was “fully behind” IWF’s “culture of alarmism letter” opposing efforts to remove hazardous chemicals from consumer products.
IWF events attacking moms who are concerned about toxic chemicals, such as this “hazmat parenting” event, featured ACSH representative Josh Bloom and chemical industry public relations writer Trevor Butterworth.

As many journalists and articles have pointed out, IWF also partners with many other Koch-funded activist groups that deny climate science and push the deregulatory agenda of corporations.

For further reading:

The Intercept, “Koch Brothers Operatives Fill Top White House Positions,” by Lee Fang (4/4/2017)

The Nation, “Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work,” by Joan Walsh (8/18/2016)

Center for Media and Democracy, “Most Known Donors of the Independent Women’s Forum are Men,” by Lisa Graves (8/24/2016)

Center for Media and Democracy, “Confirmation: the Not-so-Independent Women’s Forum was Born in Defense of Clarence Thomas and the Far Right,” by Lisa Graves and Calvin Sloan (4/21/2016)

Slate, “Confirmation Bias: How ‘Women for Judge Thomas’ turned into a conservative powerhouse,” by Barbara Spindel (4/7/2016)

Truthout,“Independent Women’s Forum Uses Misleading Branding to Push Right Wing Agenda,” by Lisa Graves, Calvin Sloan and Kim Haddow (8/19/2016)

Inside Philanthropy,“The Money Behind the Conservative Women’s Groups Still Fighting the Culture War,” by Philip Rojc (9/13/2016)

The Nation, “Guess Which Women’s Group Rush Limbaugh has Donated Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars to? Hint: it’s the one that defends him whenever he launches into a sexist tirade,” by Eli Clifton (6/12/2014)

The New Yorker, “The Koch Brothers Covert Operations,” by Jane Mayer (8/30/2010)

Oxford University Press, “Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics,” by Ronnee Schreiber (2008)

Inside Philanthropy, “Look Who’s Funding This Top Conservative Women’s Group,” by Joan Shipps (11/26/2014)

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “Conservative Women are Right for Media Mainstream; Media Have Finally Found Some Women to Love,” by Laura Flanders (3/1/1996)

Our Investigations ACSH, Carrie Lukas, Donors Capital, Donors Trust, Heather R. Higgins, Independent Women's Forum, Julie Gunlock, Kellyanne Conway, Kimberly O. Dennis, Koch Brothers, Lynne V. Cheney, Monsanto, Nancy M. Pfotenhauer, Naomi Schaefer Riley

https://www.alternet.org/environment/koch-funded-anti-climate-group-tells-women-ignore-concerns-about-toxic-chemicals

At a recent soiree at Union Station, the D.C. power elite gathered in an anti-public health confab dressed up as a celebration of women that should concern anyone who cares about the health and rights of women and children.

The Independent Women’s Forum drew an impressive array of Republican politicians to its annual gala sponsored by, among others, the American Chemistry Council, the tobacco company Philip Morris, the cosmetics industry trade group, Google and the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.

Speakers included House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump adviserKellyanne Conway, who won the IWF Valor Award for being a “passionate advocate for limited government” who does not embrace “the idea that being a woman is a handicap.” Conway is also an IWF board member.

So what is the Independent Women’s Forum? IWF got its start 25 years ago as an effort to defend now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as he faced sexual harassment charges. The group has since raised millions from the secretive foundations of the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires to carry out its mission of “increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty.”

In the world of the IWF—a group Joan Walsh described in The Nation as “the ‘feminists’ doing the Koch’s dirty work”—that means defending the freedom of corporations to sell toxic products and pollute the environment, while trying to frame that agenda as good for women and children.

E-cigarettes should be approved because of the unique biological needs of women, for example, and climate science education is too scary for students. (The e-cig letter is “standard Philip Morris PR,” says tobacco industry expert Stan Glanz, and Greenpeace classifies IWF as a “Koch Industries climate denial front group.”)

Women can also benefit by ignoring “alarmist” concerns about toxic chemicals, according to an IWF lecture series sponsored by Monsanto.

To give you a sense of the messaging on chemicals: Moms who insist on organic food are arrogant, snobby “helicopter parents” who “need to be in control of everything when it comes to their kids, even the way food is grown and treated,” according to Julie Gunlock, director of IWF’s “Culture of Alarmism” project, as quoted in an article titled “The tyranny of the organic mommy mafia” that was written by an IWF fellow.

At the IWF gala, Gunlock posed for a photo op with Monsanto staffer Aimee Hood and Julie Kelly, who writes articles casting doubt on climate science and pesticide risk, and once even called climate hero Bill McKibben “a piece of shit.”

Gunlock and Kelly are “rock stars,” Hood tweeted.

“I’m framing this,” Monsanto employee Cami Ryan tweeted in return.

Put a frame around the whole shindig and behold the absurdity of corporate-captured politics in America, where policy leaders openly embrace an anti-women “women’s group” that equates “freedom” with eating toxic pesticides, at an event sponsored by the chemical industry, a tobacco company, an extremist group that wants to do away with a voter-elected Senate and the world’s most influential news source.

Meanwhile in the rational world

In just the past few weeks, the Journals of the American Medical Association published a Harvard study implicating pesticide-treated foods in fertility problems, a UC San Diego study documenting huge increases in human exposure to a common pesticide, and a physician’s commentary urging people to eat organic food.Recent science suggests that if you want to get pregnant and raise healthy children, you should reject the propaganda that groups like the Independent Women’s Forum are trying to sell.

I wrote about those studies in more detail here, “Trying to get pregnant? Science suggests: eat organic and regulate the pesticide industry”.

Mainstream groups have been giving similar advice for years.

In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended reducing children’s exposure to pesticides due to a growing body of literature that links pesticides to chronic health problems in children, including behavioral problems, birth defects, asthma and cancer.

In 2009, the bipartisan President’s Cancer Panel reported: “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”

The panel urged then-President George W. Bush “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

Unfortunately for our nation, acting on that advice has not been possible in a political system indentured to corporate interests.

Corporate capture of health and science

For decades, pesticide corporations have manipulated science and U.S. regulatory agencies to keep the truth hidden about the health dangers of their chemicals.

The details are being revealed by hundreds of thousands of pages of industry documents turned loose from legal discovery, whistleblowers and FOIA requests that have been examined in government hearings and by many media outlets.

For a synopsis of Monsanto’s “long-running secretive campaign to manipulate the scientific record, to sway public opinion, and to influence regulatory assessments” on its herbicide glyphosate, see this essay by my colleague Carey Gillam in Undark magazine.

As one example of government/corporate collusion: in 2015, on the Obama administration’s watch, the EPA official in charge of evaluating the cancer risk ofglyphosate allegedly bragged to a Monsanto executive about helping to “kill” another agency’s cancer study, as Bloomberg reported.

Suppressing science has been a bipartisan, decades-long project. Since 1973, Monsanto has presented dubious science to claim the safety of glyphosate while EPA largely looked the other way, as Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman documented for In These Times.

Brown and Grossman spent two years examining the publicly available archive of EPA documents on glyphosate, and reported:

“Glyphosate is a clear case of ‘regulatory capture’ by a corporation acting in its own financial interest while serious questions about public health remain in limbo. The record suggests that in 44 years—through eight presidential administrations—EPA management has never attempted to correct the problem. Indeed, the pesticide industry touts its forward-looking, modern technologies as it strives to keep its own research in the closet, and relies on questionable assumptions and outdated methods in regulatory toxicology.”

The only way to establish a scientific basis for evaluating glyphosate’s safety, they wrote, would be to “force some daylight between regulators and the regulated.”

Limited government means freedomtoharm

In Trump’s Washington, there is no daylight at all between the corporations selling harmful products and the agencies that are supposed to regulate them.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruittis pushing scientists off advisory boards and stacking the EPA with political appointees connected to the oil, coal and chemical industries, many of whom are connected to climate science deniers.

As one of his first official actions, Pruitt tossed aside the recommendation of EPA’s scientists and allowed Dow Chemical to keep selling a pesticide developed as a nerve gas that is linked to brain damage in children.

“Kids are told to eat fruits and vegetables, but EPA scientists found levels of this pesticide on such foods at up to 140 times the limits deemed safe,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in a scathing NYT op-ed. “Trump’s most enduring legacy may be cancer, infertility and diminished I.Q.s for decades to come.”

Pruitt has gone so far as to put a chemical industry lobbyist in charge of a sweeping new toxics law that was supposed to regulate the chemical industry.

It’s all so outrageous – but then, it has been for a very long time.

That sweeping new toxics law, which passed last year in a hailstorm of bipartisan glory, was opposed by many environmental groups but lauded by—and reportedly written by—the American Chemistry Council.

“The $800 billion chemical industry lavishes money on politicians and lobbies its way out of effective regulation. This has always been a problem, but now the Trump administration has gone so far as to choose chemical industry lobbyists to oversee environmental protections,” as Kristof described it.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics protested the administration’s decision on the nerve gas pesticide, but officials sided with industry over doctors. The swamp won. The chemical industry lobby, the American Chemistry Council, is today’s version of Big Tobacco…”

“Someday we will look back and wonder: What were we thinking?!”

The character of our country

A decade ago, the Independent Women’s Forum presented its Valor Award to Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s largest breast cancer organization – a group that has also drawn criticism for taking money from polluting corporations and promoting unhealthy food and toxic products.

At the 2007 IWF gala, in an acceptance speech she called “The Character of our Country,” Brinker warned that millions of lives will be lost unless America acts to avert the coming “cancer tsunami.”

But then, she said: “My friends, this is not a problem of politics. When it comes to cancer, there are no Republicans or Democrats, no liberals or conservatives.”

Rather, she said, invoking vagueness as she stood before a group that tells women not to worry about pesticides, at an event awash in corporate cash, beating cancer is a matter of summoning the will to make cancer a “national and global priority!”

But that is exactly a problem of politics. It’s about Republicans and Democrats, both of whom have let Americans down by failing to confront the chemical industry. It’s about summoning the political will to get chemicals linked to cancer, infertility and brain damage off the market and out of our food.

In the meantime, we can take the advice of science: eat organic and vote for politicians who are willing to stand up to the pesticide industry.

This article first appeared in Huffington Post.

Stacy Malkan is co-director of U.S. Right to Know,

fox and fr denier bs educ 2

https://www.ecowatch.com/fox-schools-climate-2480338939.html

---

Julie Gunlock - Independent Women's Forum

www.iwf.org › About

Julie Gunlock is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and leads the ... She has offered political commentary on Fox News, TheBlaze TV and other ...

off bs

:{[:{}:

Senior Fellow, Director of Culture of Alarmism Project

Julie Gunlock is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and leads the organization’s Culture of Alarmism Project. She is the author of the book From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back.

Before joining IWF, Gunlock served as a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and on the House Homeland Security Committee, and on the staffs of Ohio Senators Mike DeWine, George Voinovich, and Tom Coburn. Gunlock has written about food and culture for the New York Post, the Washington Post, New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, National Review Magazine, National Interest Magazine, the Tampa Tribune, and Townhall.com and is a regular contributor to National Review Online, BlogHer and Huffington Post. She has offered political commentary on Fox News, TheBlaze TV and other networks and is a regular guest on local, regional and national radio programs.

She lives in Virginia with her husband and three young, active, and perpetually hungry boys.

](https://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.iwf.org/about/julie-gunlock+julie+gunlock+fox&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgnKfmwI7WAhUC02MKHT4mDz4QHwgwMAA)}:

huffpo

:{[:{ https://www.ecowatch.com/fox-schools-climate-2480338939.html}:

Flushing Busybody Politicians

Let’s All Be Reasonable Moms

Some Parents Choose To Put Kids In Harm’s Way

Food Labeling Fatigue

Women Victorious In U.S. Supreme Court’s Harris V. Quinn

Consciously Uncoupling From the Kids

Guilt-Plagued Moms Want Information, Not Alarmism

Change My Mind : Should the Government Be Feeding Your Kids Lunch?

](https://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.iwf.org/about/julie-gunlock+julie+gunlock+fox&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgnKfmwI7WAhUC02MKHT4mDz4QHwgwMAA)}:

Fox & Friends guest: Schools have a liberal bias because they want to ...

https://thinkprogress.org/fox-friends-guest-claims-schools-have-a-liberal-bias-because...

4 days ago - In a segment on Fox & Friends Friday morning, Julie Gunlock, senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, argued that schools across the ...

Julie Gunlock (@JGunlock) | Twitter

https://twitter.com/jgunlock?lang=en

The latest Tweets from Julie Gunlock (@JGunlock). Senior Fellow at @IWF. Author, From Cupcakes to Chemicals. Contributor at @Acculturated, @NRO, ...

Julie Gunlock | New York Post

nypost.com/author/julie-gunlock/

“There are just certain things boys should never see their mothers do,” says Megan Fox, a sexy-as-they-come actress who has starred in a series of Hollywood ...

'Fox & Friends' Upset Over Schools Teaching Trans Acceptance ...

https://www.advocate.com/.../fox-friends-upset-over-schools-teaching-trans-acceptanc...

4 days ago - Fox & Friends Upset Over Schools Teaching Trans Acceptance, Climate Change. Hegseth and Gunlock. Pete Hegseth and Julie Gunlock.

Julie Gunlock | The American Spectator

https://spectator.org/bio/julie-gunlock/

Julie Gunlock is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and directs ... She has offered political commentary on Fox News, TheBlaze TV and other ...

NEXT on Fox News > Julie Gunlock,... - Independent Women's Forum ...

https://www.facebook.com/independentwomensforum/.../a.../10154251011709175/?...

NEXT on Fox News > Julie Gunlock, Independent Women's Forum, joins FOX & Friends Weekend to discuss Mayor Bill de Blasio's call for a city-wide boycott...

Julie Gunlock | Fox News Insider

insider.foxnews.com/tag/julie-gunlock

Fox News Insider is the place for all things Fox News Channel. We post highlights within minutes of airing and provide exclusive Fox Fan ... Julie Gunlock ...

higgins Read more >>

Bradley Foundation Fueled "Independent Women's Forum" Campaign Against Paid Sick Leave Laws By Lisa Graves — The Bradley Foundation underwrote new efforts to undermine popular public policies that help women and families, such as paid sick leave laws through funding for the controversial Independent Women's Forum.

:{:{}:

---

Each year, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller marks “Equal Pay Day” by publishing a piece attacking the idea that women are paid less than men or trying to rationalize the pay gap.

This year, The Daily Caller criticized Google for highlighting the pay gap through Cheryl Sandburg’s Lean In initiative and a Funny or Die video about women being paid 20% less than men.

The piece, attributed to Carlson’s non-profit charity, the Daily Caller NewsFoundation, was illustrated with a photo of a woman “showered with money.”

The author, a recent college grad who is a Breitbart alum and former Koch intern, noted without irony that “the so-called wage gap only makes sense if hours worked, years of experience, and education of male and female laborers are considered.” It might help to read that “critique” again.

For good measure, the Daily Caller ran a second piece that day, a reprint of a blog claiming Elizabeth Warren paid women less than men. That spin bounced through the rightwing echo chamber from the Washington Free Beacon to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox, before it was refuted by Warren’s payroll data. No correction was issued by any of the outlets that spread the attack on Warren. (The Beacon has described itself as an “aerial hunting operation” and it has attacked watchdogs like the Center for Media and Democracy.)

But that’s par for the course for The Daily Caller. Though its website has more than 16 million visitors and a huge staff of writers who produce content for it through its non-profit the Daily Caller News Foundation, the site routinely relies on rightwing bloggers and groups to provide many of the “facts” it asserts as true in its news stories.

During the presidential election season, The Daily Caller was rife with articles attacking Hillary Clinton, including a piece by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF)that reinforced Trump’s nicknaming Clinton as “crooked,” which some might consider projection given his documented history of cheating contractors out of their full pay or the Trump University scam or more.

IWF’s smear piece published in The Daily Caller in the run-up to the presidential election could have been written this year about the policymaker-in-chief: “The bigger problem is that she doesn’t think the rules should apply to her in the first place. HRC – or Her Royal Crookness – sees herself as a Queen, existing in a realm above the minions who work for her, and even higher above her lowly subjects. Queens don’t have to bother with the system meant for ordinary schlubs. She doesn’t have to accept facts or findings; we peons are expected to accept her version of events, rather than trust our own lyin’ eyes.”

IWF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that is theoretically barred from intervening in an election by criticizing the character of a candidate.That story by the head of IWF concludes with: “Americans recall that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, after all, and those laws are meant to apply to everyone, even those with titles like Secretary or Senator. That’s bad news for Her Royal Crookness, Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the elitism that Americans resoundingly reject.” IWF has not issued, and The Daily Caller has not published, a follow-up on that take in light of Trump’s acts as president.

Last summer, CMD released a major report detailing IWF’s history and role in the War on Women, a story that was broken by Joan Walsh in The Nation. CMD also documented that almost all of the publicly known funders of the IWF”s affiliated (c)(4), the “Independent Women’s Voice,” were men. CMD also filed an FEC complaint against IWV last November contending that the group violated election laws, which IWV denies.

CMD also documented how as IWF was claiming there was no “war on women,” IWV was running ads and doing calls to aid politicians like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that IWF has sponsored a forum where its panelists contended that “rape culture statistics have been blown out of proportion in the United States, and that this is largely a product of the media’s focus on rape and sexual assault.” That’s the description from The Daily Caller’s coverage of the event. Another piece, titled “Restraining Orders Hurt Women” also credited IWF’s analysis.

IWF, by the way, has opposed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) for years and its renewal, despite the strong support for its protections by groups that represent women’s interests in not getting killed by a violent partner. VAWA helps fund a coordinated community response to help women who are beaten, raped, or stalked–and it helps ensure that those restraining orders are enforced across jurisdictions to help protect women where ever they may flee for safety.

IWF’s out-of-step assertions as a mainstream “women’s voice” have found a ready distribution channel in The Daily Caller. Take, for example, an article headlined “Stay vertical a bit longer, ladies: Study claims men as winning the game of love,” which featured IWF’s claims about marriage and sex. IWF’s rep expressed concerns about women engaging in “commitment-less sex” because “when it comes to marriage there is certainly a marketplace and many factors have changed that marketplace.”

That Daily Caller story also cited the controversial academic Mark Regnerus, who as CMD recently noted, has “claimed, for example, that ‘liberal’ and ‘very liberal’ women want to have much more sex than other women [and to] speculate that liberal women want more sex than other women because they’re not religious enough.Specifically, Regnerus theorizes that sex provides the “transcendent” feeling others achieve through faith – that these liberal women are getting in bed, as it were, what they’re not getting in church. ‘Basically,’ Regnerus writes, ‘liberal women substitute sex for religion.’ (Insert obligatory ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ joke here.)”

It’s not just sex on the brain of The Daily Caller, which regularly features swimsuit models to peddle its spin, like its “story” minimizing the effects of climate change on the day Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement: “These 14 Models Prepared for Trump to Drop the Climate Deal.” The text accompanying the slideshow stated: “As we approach President Trump’s decision on the Paris climate accord, we decided to turn our attention to the models out there who have been hoping for warmer temperatures.”

The Daily Caller’s news presentation has sought to undermine grassroots efforts to secure paid leave and increase the minimum wage. One example is their story “Social Justice Activists Want Olive Garden To Be Nicer to Cows Before Serving Them As Meatballs.” That story emphasized that “Thus far, the coalitions’ campaign is not going well. The group’s attempt to set up meetings with Darden in the fall was an abysmal failure. The company responded with a letter rebuffing meetings and generally rejecting the demands set forth.” Other pieces pushed the rightwing narrative that requiring paid sick leave and increasing the minimum wage would lead to higher unemployment rates.

The Daily Caller has even written against maternity leave pay.One such piece was written by the Independence Institute, which is part of the State Policy Network: “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women.” That’s not the view of most women or even of most CEOs, as CMD revealed last year after it was given a detailed survey by Frank Luntz’s group showing overwhelming support for maternity leave, paid sick leave, raising the minimum wage.

That survey of 1,000 executives was commissioned to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its global corporate funders and its state affiliates in their efforts to defeat popular paid sick leave policies and efforts to increase the minimum wage. Luntz’s team said the problem was business leaders have

Another Daily Caller piece amplified the assertions of the controversial PR flack Rick Berman–who 60 Minutes helped dub “Dr. Evil”–that “The $15 Minimum Wage Could Lead to More Youth Crime.” Like IWF, the claims of Berman’s front groups get plenty of play in The Daily Caller. CMD recently detailed how Berman’s front groups are funded not just by corporations but also with millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, which also funds IWF’s promo of “free market” alternatives to paid sick leave and raises in the minimum wage. CMD also published the audio of Berman bragging about his tactics: “I get up every morning and I try and figure out how to screw with the labor unions” and “marginalize the people on the other side….”

CMD has previously refuted to The Daily Caller’s claims about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and its assertions on climate change and fracking, but has not responded to every erroneous claim the outlet has made about CMD. Among other things, like other rightwing outfits, the Daily Caller has repeated the claim that CMD is “Soros-funded,” even though CMD has pointed out that it is not funded by George Soros and was awarded a grant from the Open Society Institute several years ago as part of a set of grants to examine national security surveillance of Americans, along with a grant to the Kochs’ Cato Institute–which the Daily Caller has never called “Soros-funded.”

During CMD’s investigation of IWF, its researchers noted the wayThe Daily Caller was readily echoing IWF claims on numerous issues. That led CMD to take a closer look at The Daily Caller’s operations, which resulted in the investigation reported by the Washington Post on June 2, 2017. More details about that research, which showed that Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller had received a six-figure sum from the Trump Campaign in the weeks before the election, are availablehere.

As Callum Borchers noted in the Washington Post story,tax experts have expressed concerns about how Tucker Carlson’s charity benefits his for-profit media outlet,The Daily Caller, which profits from the web traffic and list-building resulting from its content, a substantial portion of which is provided by the non-profit. CMD has also noted that Carlson did not tell FOX News viewers that he had financially benefited from the Trump Campaign cash, as he critiqued other outlets for their purported bias against Trump or when he interviewed Trump for a primetime show on FOX this spring.

How much Carlson received in pay or bonuses from The Daily Caller last year after it received the money from the Trump Campaign is not known.

---

But he does have close ties to Higgins. She contacted Friess to get funding to begin James O’Keefe’s controversial campaign against ACORN.

big cmd report: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3026994/Independent-Womens-Forum-Voice-Report-by-CMD-08.pdf**

some rep?

Independent Women’s Forum and its 501(c)(4) affiliate, the Independent Women’s Voice, market themselves to the media and voters as “non-partisan,” “independent,” and “neutral.”

However, a new investigation of the groups by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveals them to be anything but that. Joan Walsh in the Nation broke this story today along with other new details about these not-so independent women’s groups.

[Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work

The Independent Women’s Forum has leveraged its “non-partisan” brand to become an aggressive player in Republican politics.

By Joan Walsh

If you watch cable news, you’ve seen someone from an outfit called the “Independent Women’s Forum”promoting a conservative take on the women’s issue of the day. It’s no secret that the group leans right; it grew out of “Women for Judge Thomas,” which formed during Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas at his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and was formally launched in 1992 by the late Barbara Olson and Rosalie “Ricky” Silberman, along with a cadre of powerful conservative women that included former second lady Lynne Cheney. Still, it’s always billed itself as “non-partisan” and “independent.” In its early years, it promoted IWF-affiliated author Christina Hoff Sommers’s brand of “equity feminism” and opposed the “radical feminism” of the ’90s women’s movement, which it argued was pushing myths about sexual harassment, pay inequities, and discrimination in the workplace and widespread abuse on college campuses. For years it played no formal role in electoral politics.

But an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), provided exclusively to The Nation, reveals that since 2010, IWF and its political arm, Independent Women’s Voice, have become aggressive players in Republican politics, embedded in the network of organizations backed by Charles and David Koch, advocating for the Koch brothers’ myriad concerns, and playing on their “independent” label to elect GOP candidates. If this country is to elect its first woman president, Hillary Clinton will have to face down this powerful conservative women’s group to get there.

“Our value here...is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable” —Heather Higgins

Increasingly, IWF and IWV are playing a bigger and more open role in Republican politics—while boasting about the way their “independent” label gives them access to voters that groups “branded” as Republican can’t reach. As IWV president Heather Higgins told a convening at the David Horowitz Freedom Center late last year (captured in this video): “Our value here, and what is needed in the Republican conservative arsenal, is a group that can talk to those cohorts [non-Republican women] that would not otherwise listen, but can do it in a way that is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable and will get a hearing.”

And at a recent gathering of the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), IWF Executive Director Sabrina Schaeffer similarly bragged about her group’s success bringing an “independent” message on issues like paid family leave to even “progressive” women. Once IWF provided (highly debatable) information about how such legislation hurts women, “we were able to drop support by a double-digit spread,” Schaeffer told the group, according to notes taken at the event obtained by CMD.

Using their “independent” label to help Republicans isn’t the groups’ only misrepresentation. Although it claims to be neutral on abortion—“The IWF has never taken a stance on abortion,” Sabrina Schaeffer told the pro-choice website Rewire last year—since 2012, all but one of the GOP congressional candidates backed by IWV have had a zero rating from NARAL Pro Choice America, or were newcomers who support strict limits on abortion (the exception was Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown). And while an IWF editor blasted Donald Trump as “Todd Akin on steroids” earlier this year, IWV even spent money to help Akin’s disastrous Senate campaign in 2012.

Despite many conservative leaders’ uneasiness with Trump, Heather Higgins is now an enthusiastic supporter of the man her colleague labeled “Todd Akin on steroids.” Though she once mocked Trump as “the Kardashian of politics,” she’s done a full Kanye West and now supports him—passionately.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” she told a panel titled “Will Conservatives Support Trump?” at the GOP convention in Cleveland last month, according to audio taken there. “Your choice is Hillary Clinton who will be wrong on all issues.… Trump will surround himself with principled, savvy advisers who will lead us to the best possible outcomes on a wide range of [issues] and his judicial picks.” Though conservatives may be balking now, she said, by November, Trump will win in a “landslide.” To that end, Higgins has turned her Twitter feed into a running defense of Trump, praising his call to “Second Amendment people” to “do something” about Hillary Clinton as “brilliant,” defending his claim that calling President Obama the “founder” of ISIS was sarcasm, and attacking Trump’s detractors. Remarkably, Trump just made IWF board member Kellyanne Conway his campaign manager.

“It’s clear that IWF andIWVare in the business of saying one thing, but doing another,” said CMD Executive Director Lisa Graves, who co-authored the report, “The Not-So-Independent Women’s Forum/Voice.” “They call themselves ‘independent,’ while IWF backs policies that echo the corporate lobbying agenda and IWV tells donors it’s a crucial part of the ‘Republican conservative arsenal.’”

The Nation sent three e-mails and made two phone calls to IWF/V asking for comment. One of the e-mails wrongly stated that the group had only helped Republicans. In fact, according to CMD research, it once aided a Libertarian. Communications Director Victoria Coley sent this reply:

It’s tough to respond to the CMD report that we haven’t yet seen, especially when one of the only things we know about it—its claim that IWV spends money politically “exclusively on behalf of Republicans”—is demonstrably false. If they can’t even get that right—especially when it’s so easy to check—we can’t help but wonder what else the report asserts that just is not so?

I told Coley that was my mistake, not CMD’s, and sent a list of questions, but heard nothing more.

* * *

In the 1990s, IWF was a plucky organization devoted to debunking “radical” feminism, promoting the work of IWF author Christina Hoff Summers—remember “Who Stole Feminism?” and “The War Against Boys”?—and railing against new laws prohibiting sex discrimination and sexual harassment, showing (with questionable data) how they would actually hurt women. IWF lobbied against the 1994 “Violence Against Women Act,” claiming “wives instigate violence, including severe violence, against husbands more often than husbands do against wives.” It opposed the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute and joined with men’s sports organizations to attack Title IX education regulations that protected funding for female sports teams as unfair to men.

But with the arrival of Koch Industries lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer in 2001, the group began to affiliate itself more with the issues on the Kochs’ agenda, as well as with groups that the brothers fund. Since then there’s been a steady connection of IWF/V staffers and board members with various Koch affiliates. Pfotenhauer even took over as president of the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity in 2003, running it jointly with IWF from the same office into 2005.

More than half of IWF’s current board members have either received funding from Koch groups or worked for one of them.

Today, the IWF website looks like it still shares content with Americans for Prosperity, with posts devoted to lowering corporate tax rates and ending the “death tax,” criticizing food stamps, promoting gun rights and fracking—alongside screeds against Hillary Clinton and on how Title IX hurts boys. On its website, IWV says its five core issues areas are “healthcare, responsible government, workplace regulation, energy and economic literacy,” which are all core concerns of the Kochs and their allies. “Economic literacy,” for instance, is defined as the Kochs do: by adherence to free-market principles and opposition to public-employee unions. More than half of IWF’s current board members have either received funding from Koch-affiliated groups or worked for one of them, CMD says, as have roughly half of the IWF staff.

Still, with the hiring of attorney Michelle Bernard as president in 2006, IWF made an attempt to craft a new, genuinely “independent” middle stance, at least on a few issues, to try to bring together women of more diverse points of view. Bernard, who is African-American, expanded outreach to women of different races and classes and succeeded in reaching even some liberal women with her emphasis on education reform and school choice, a cause that in those years began to attract some neoliberal Democrats and frustrated African Americans. A grant from the State Department to work on human-rights issues with Muslim women in Iraq and elsewhere also took the group beyond its normal issues. In 2008, Bernard proved her own independence by backing Obama for president.

But the election of Obama along with the elevation of pharmaceutical heiress and former investment adviser Heather Higgins to chair the IWF board and lead Independent Women’s Voice changed the group’s approach. Pfotenhauer had founded IWV, the group’s 501(c)(4), in 2004, but IWV took a back seat to the more prominent activities of IWF. But the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling unleashed a tide of dark money, and IWV became a conduit, raising and spending money, and sometimes passing it along to affiliated conservative groups.

Under Higgins, IWF and IWV joined the cadre of right-wing players devoted to blocking Obama’s agenda, particularly the Affordable Care Act. IWF produced and ran an ad charging that the ACA would hurt women with breast cancer, for instance. That ad was called “really faulty” by the American Cancer Society and drew a “false” rating from Factcheck.org. Bernard left the group in October 2010. Soon the IWV, under Higgins, would out-raise and outspend IWF, the sister group, according to CMD.

Some of IWV’s moves would even seem to undermine IWF’s stated principles. The group has, controversially among conservatives, stayed away from the issue of abortion. “It…sets us apart from other organizations, because we don’t talk about abortion and gay marriage and some of those social issues that are in many ways are very alienating to women,” IWF director Schaeffer told Glamour magazine in 2013. “So many people are so discouraged when you have people on the fringe saying comments that are obviously offensive, saying things about ‘legitimate rape.’ I don’t know what inspires anybody to say words like that.”

But, in fact, CMD found that IWV spent $850,000 in 2014 supporting GOP Senate candidates who had a zero rating from NARAL, except for Scott Brown. And though Schaeffer specifically criticized Missouri GOP Representative Todd Akin’s “obviously offensive” remarks about “legitimate rape” to Glamour in 2013, the previous year IWV spent $67,000 to help Akin in his unsuccessful fight to unseat Senator Claire McCaskill. IWV invested another $177,000 in Indiana Representative Richard Mourdock’s Senate race, even after he said rape “is something God intended to happen,” which was also judged by many to be obviously offensive and likely cost Mourdock the election.

“Our investigation showed that Higgins uses IWV’s independent brand name to reach independent or Democratic voters and spends money to help anti-choice extremists,” CMD’s Lisa Graves notes, “while IWF claims it is not anti-abortion and there is no GOP ‘war on women.’”

* * *

Indeed, at the David Horowitz event where Higgins bragged about her group’s role in the “Republican conservative arsenal,” she explained that IWV has success “with audiences that normally don’t tend to like to hear from Republicans and conservatives” because “branding matters…. We have worked hard to create a branded organization that does not carry partisan baggage. It’s called ‘Independent Women’s Voice.’ Being branded as neutral, but having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative, puts us in a unique position.”

Higgins took credit for turning around Scott Brown’s 2010 Senate campaignin Massachusetts (by figuring out that the most important issue to voters was giving Republicans “the 41st vote” against the ACA) and for helping Kentucky GOP Governor Matt Bevin squeak by last year mainly by targeting “Democrats, liberals, and independents,” she said. “Having this branding, you can go places where, if you’re the [Republican National Committee] or the [Republican Governors Association]…they can’t get access that we can.”

Spending for both IWF and IWV grew by more than 400 percent from 2011 to 2012.

Spending for both IWF and IWV grew by more than 400 percent from 2011 to 2012, according to CMD, reflecting the new investment in electioneering. The two groups have raised $16 million since 2010. Since the Citizens United decision that year, groups like IWF and IWV don’t have to disclose many of their donors, so it’s hard to know who’s behind the funding explosion. Higgins’s Randolph Foundation is a big donor, directing $3.78 million to IWF since 1998. The Koch-allied anti-Obamacare Center to Protect Patient Rights gave IWV $250,000 in 2009 to fund its push against the ACA, according to CMD, and the National Right to Work Committee has also funded the group in 2012 and 2013. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which secretly direct the funding of wealthy conservatives, including the Kochs, gave the groups $5.3 million between 2002 and 2014, the most recent year for which they have filed data. Although IWV boasts of accepting “no Koch money,” IWF received more than $8oo,000 from Koch-controlled family foundations between 2001 and 2012, CMD says.

In 2016, IWF and IWV have turned to the threat of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as the pro-family agenda she and her allies are pushing with her campaign. The groups are uniquely placed to try to fight the gender gap that may doom Donald Trump and cost the GOP the Senate. As IWF’s Schaeffer told ALEC in July, “The war on women narrative has shifted from a focus entirely on reproductive rights to a focus on making the workplace fair for women. And I don’t need to tell you issues of pay equity, childcare subsidies, paid leave mandates, flexibility, overtime regulation, licensing, retirement—these are all now sort of the new front in the war on women, and we are doing our best to push back on that.”

IWF told women in focus groups that paid family leave actually hurts rather than helps the working poor.

Unfortunately for Republicans, Schaeffer noted, IWF polling shows that “people are overwhelmingly supportive of laws like the Healthy Families Act [which would mandate paid sick leave], and that includes conservatives, and so we have to do a much better job of talking about them.” When IWF told women in focus groups that paid family leave actually hurts rather than helps the working poor—Schaeffer offered no evidence for that claim—support dropped, she told the ALEC meeting. Even among “progressive women,” Schaeffer said, a message that paid leave both hurts the working poor, and limits their own work flexibility—again, she shared no evidence—reduced support by double digits.

The popularity of Democrats’ family-support legislation led IWF to put together its own “limited government” family-support package, named “Working for Women,” consisting of programs accomplished through the tax codes, like “personal care accounts” that would let a woman save for a family leave tax-free, as well as pushing for comp time rather than overtime, plus deregulating child care to make it more affordable. Schaeffer offered to help ALEC members find ways to push these “limited government” alternatives, rather than have nothing to counter the popular family-support proposals put forward by Democrats.

“In my opinion that’s deceptive, although unfortunately it is not usual for Koch-connected groups to behave like front groups that use appealing names that cloak their real agendas, especially to try to win elections,” CMD’s Lisa Graves said.

Meanwhile, Heather Higgins keeps up her Twitter advocacy of Donald Trump.

They don’t get sarcasm. Or irony. Or honest answers. But the rest of us do, and it’s a powerful differentiator @IWV https://t.co/IQ6A6yR5Er

— Heather R. Higgins (@TheHRH) August 12, 2016

Higgins may want to ask herself whether she’s providing “honest answers” when she boasts of using her independent “brand” to hype Republicans.

]

CMD’s Reporters’ Guide exposes the groups’ leaders admitting to—and boasting about—their true role for what it is: finding ways to sell right-wing policies and candidates favored by their funders to reach independent women voters under the guise of neutrality.

IWV Boasts of Its Role in “Republican Conservative Arsenal”

“Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position,” Heather Richardson Higgins, the President of the Independent Women’s Voice and the Board Chair of theIndependent Women’s Forum, admitted in a speech to potential 2016 donors at a David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat.

“Our value here and what is needed in the Republican conservative arsenal is a group that can talk to those cohorts [women who are not Republican conservatives] that would not otherwise listen but can do it in a way that is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable,” she said.

While the Independent Women’s Forum and the Independent Women’s Voice claim to the public and press that they are a mainstream voice for women voters, their spending and their leaders’ speeches reveal the truth.

“Independent” is a PR term these groups use to appeal to women while pushing corporate-backed policies or extreme candidates that actually make things harder for working women and their families, in CMD’s assessment.

IWF Attacks Work Policies It Admits Many Women Like

The Independent Women’s Forum routinely attacks policies popular with many women, like equal pay, earned sick leave, and raising the minimum wage, as well as Title IX and protections for battered women.

And it has often done so by making extreme claims, which CMD also documents.

CMD’s investigation includes analysis of remarks to right-wing donors by the Independent Women’s Voice’s leader Heather Higgins in 2015.

CMD also analyzed notes from a meeting of the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council in July, at which Independent Women’s Forum President Sabrina Schaefer offered to help ALEC legislators “sell” corporate-backed alternatives to paid sick leave, equal pay, quality childcare, and workplace flexibility in their home states.

IWV Spent to Help “War on Women” GOP Candidates

CMD also describes how Independent Women’s Voice made “independent expenditures” on political ads or calls to aid some of the most extreme “War on Women” GOP candidates, including the following:

It spent $67,242 to aid Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin with calls and independent voter outreach in November 2012, after Akin claimed on August 19, 2012 that rape victims couldn’t get pregnant because “if it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
It spent $176,991 on a “Romney wants Mourdock” ad after Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock asserted that when a woman is raped, she carries a “gift from God” and that such a pregnancy “is something that God intended to happen.”
Joe Walsh, a GOP Rep. from Illinois claimed in the 2012 race against Tammy Duckworth that abortions to save a mother’s life are never medically necessary. Two weeks later, Independent Women’s Voice spent more than $5,000 on calls and outreach to independent voters in his district.
In the 2014 Senate races, CMD’s research finds that Independent Women’s Voice spent more than$850,000 on GOP candidates, most of whom had 0% NARAL ratings; it spent more than $5 million that year on related advocacy.
Higgins also told donors that Independent Women’s Voice made the only significant independent expenditure in Mark Sanford’s 2012 congressional race in South Carolina. She said Independent Women’s Voice worked to convince “evangelicals to hold their nose and vote for Mark in order to be able to hold onto that seat and not have the liberal win it.”

IWF’s Koch Ties and More

CMD’s investigation also includes an analysis of how the Independent Women’s Forum works as part of the Koch policy world infrastructure through its staff and alliances.

No fewer than half of the Independent Women’s Forum’s full-time staff previously worked directly for Koch-controlled groups or for entities that received Koch funding.

The Independent Women’s Forum also pushes numerous policies aligned with Koch-funded groups like David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

CMD’s analysis also shows that between 2001 and 2014, DonorsTrust and DonorsCapital Fund–funding entities with ties to the Koch network of billionaires–gave the Independent Women’s Forum a total of $5,344,000 in donations.

In a similar period, Koch-controlled foundations gave the group more than $800,000. Although many of the names of the Independent Women’s Forum’s big donors are not disclosed, documents analyzed by CMD reveal funding from the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil and right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, among others.

A review of tax filings shows that Higgins is the largest individually identified donor to IWF in recent years.

The full CMD Reporters’ Guide is available here and can be viewed below. And here are links to materials with quotes from IWF/V in general and about women’s rights, civil rights, unions and worker rights, LGBTQ rights, our environment, education, guns, health, and the ACA.