DeWeese, T

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">convergence: xian, ncppr, cfact, agenda 21, TP, militia, wise use, jbs</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref 2 GUK</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Agenda 21: a conspiracy theory puts sustainability in the crosshairs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Could right-wing attacks on a non-binding UN sustainability resolution put sustainable business at risk in some states?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greg Harman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wed 24<b> Jun 2015 </b></font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Green space, clean energy, increased urban density...and global dictatorship. It’s hard to see how all of these things could connect, but — according to a popular right wing conspiracy theory — a UN resolution aimed at sustainable development could pave the way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Theorists argue that Agenda 21, a 23-year-old non-binding UN resolution that suggests ways for governments and NGOs to promote sustainable development, is the linchpin in a plot to subjugate humanity under an eco-totalitarian regime. One of its most outspoken critics,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> <b style="">American Policy Center president Tom DeWeese</b>, has described the resolution as “a new kind of tyranny that, if not stopped, will surely lead us to a new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind”.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">APC is on the political fringes, but anti-Agenda 21 sentiment is moving into the political mainstream. Criticism of the resolution extended to the Republican party’s 2012 platform, which stated: “We strongly reject the UN Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Legislators in several states have even created anti-Agenda 21 bills, many of which could pose serious threats to companies pursuing sustainability in those states.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In Arizona, for example, a proposed bill dictated that the state could not “adopt or implement the creed, doctrine, or principles or any tenet” of Agenda 21,</b> and prohibited it from “implementing programs of, expending any sum of money for, being a member of, receiving funding from, contracting services from, or giving financial or other forms of aid to” a host of organizations with sustainability agendas, including the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taken at face value, Arizona’s bill – which was defeated in 2012 – would have curtailed almost any sustainability efforts in the state, restricted the activities of tens of thousands of philanthropic organizations that promote sustainability, and potentially scared away hundreds of sustainability-minded companies. If it had passed, it could also have cost the state millions of dollars in lost revenue, as well as thousands of jobs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">If it hadn’t been defeated, Phoenix mayor Greg Stanton feared the bill “would send the message that Phoenix doesn’t believe in a sustainable economic future. It could negatively impact not only Phoenix and its residents, but the entire state</span>”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Agenda 21 addresses issues ranging from children’s health to public transportation to women’s empowerment, all of which could also have been severely curtailed under the sweeping wording of Arizona’s bill. The state’s chamber of commerce was among the bill’s staunchest opponents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Battles in the statehouse</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Arizona’s bill was especially concerning, it’s only one of several anti-Agenda 21 bills that have come to the floor in state legislatures across the country. Almost all have failed, either dying in committee, getting defeated on the statehouse floor or – in the case of Missouri’s 2013 bill – getting vetoed by the governor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The exception was Alabama, which unanimously adopted a law in 2012 to prevent any future effort to “deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to ‘Agenda 21’</span>”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Alabama’s legislation demonstrates, one of the biggest dangers of anti-Agenda 21 bills lies in their often-vague wording, which can obscure many of their potential impacts. Arizona house minority leader Chad Campbell called his state’s bill the “most poorly crafted bill” in the statehouse at the time. “We wouldn’t be able to use CFL light bulbs in state buildings because that would be considered energy efficiency,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In Texas, a similarly sweeping anti-Agenda 21 bill submitted this year sought to prevent any governmental entity from accepting money from or granting money to any “nongovernmental or intergovernmental organization accredited by the United Nations to implement a policy that originated in the Agenda 21 plan”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To get an understanding of the breadth of this language, it’s worth noting that, under its broadest interpretation, Texas’ bill could have curtailed the activities of the National Rifle Association. While the NRA is hardly a hotbed of sustainable activism, it supports several programs that dovetail with Agenda 21. Last year, for example, the group gave money to 4-H, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Texas Wildlife Association, all of which promote conservation and sponsor outdoor education - activities that could easily be linked to the sweeping priorities of Agenda 21.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The Texas bill could also have barred nonprofits that work with the UN from receiving any state or municipal funding</b>. In an email to the Houston city attorney’s office, James Cargas, the city’s senior assistant attorney for energy, wrote that it would impact “approximately 31,000 nongovernmental organizations [that] provide funding for the benefit of the general public or volunteer services”, including senior citizen advocacy group AARP, the United Way and the privately-owned Ford Foundation. In other words, had it passed the bill, Texas might have cut itself off from hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable funding.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bikers in Texas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texas motorcycles, politics and guns: welcome to the biker world</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A lightning rod</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the surface, it’s hard to see why Agenda 21 is so controversial. While it urges international cooperation, it is hardly the totalitarian, internationalist screed that critics claim. Far from promoting international governance, for example, it calls for greater local government involvement in sustainable agricultural and urban development.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But that hasn’t stopped anti-internationalist critics from portraying the resolution in the grimmest possible terms. Pundit Glen Beck, for example, hoisted the paranoid banner with Agenda 21: Into the Shadows, a 2015 novel that outlines how the feared “anti-human” scheme could unfold.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the real world, however, Agenda 21’s critics are left groping for actual targets. In an interview with the Guardian, Alabama state senator Gerald Dial conceded that his bill doesn’t have any real world application – yet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We think the long term impact is more relevant than the short term,” Dial said. “When people become more familiar with what Agenda 21 is, more business and people who are looking to locate somewhere will say, ‘Hey, Alabama would be a great place because we won’t be faced with any opportunities for the federal government to come in and mandate to take over property.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Texas state representative Molly White said that her bill requires further development because of the “complexities of this Agenda”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“My staff and I will look at other bills passed around the country during the interim to prepare the legislation and refile it for next session,” she wrote in an email.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bernice Dapaah’s bamboo bike. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From bamboo bikes to renewables: the leaders that understand sustainability</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A useful lens on both sides of the political spectrum</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given the breadth and vehemence of the anti-Agenda 21 sentiment, it is perhaps unsurprising that many sustainability organizations are reluctant to discuss it. For example, the <b>International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives,</b> perhaps the group most actively engaged in assisting local governments to achieve sustainability goals aligned with Agenda 21 goals, denied requests to discuss the resolution’s attackers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ICLEI spokesperson Celina Plaza wrote in an email that the organization prefers to “focus on positive support for local sustainability”. She added that, for the most part, “local sustainability initiatives enhance the health and economy of communities, and those who oppose these initiatives are often not acting in the best interest of citizens”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But anti-Agenda 21 sentiment may also be galvanizing some pro-sustainability activists. Kevin Wilhelm, CEO of Seattle-based Sustainable Business Consulting, said that he helped form the Washington Business for Climate Action, an association of business leaders committed to climate advocacy, after he realized that the conspiracy-minded anti-sustainability activists in his state were “much better organized” than those who supported the goals of Agenda 21.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’ve now recruited 183 businesses,” Wilhelm said. “We’re pushing back to say, ‘Look, there is a huge business opportunity and a huge business risk here [related to climate change] and we need to take action.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Key Challenges infographic</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Leaders identify key sustainability challenges - infographic</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mitchell Silver, former president of the American Planning Association, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to urban planning, said that those making wild claims about the dangers of sustainable development are on the losing side of the argument.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What I want to hear from opponents of sustainable development is where are you going to put 50m new housing units over the next few decades?” he told Reuters in 2012. “So far, I haven’t gotten an answer to that question.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Citing his state’s failed anti-Agenda 21 bill, Arizona state senator Steve Farley says that there is a <b>growing awareness among business-minded Arizona Republicans that their Tea Party-aligned colleagues are hurting the state’s business interests.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Sometimes these conspiracies get a life of their own and those people you depend on to support your tax-cutting majority sabotage you [by] destabilizing the overall economic climate,” Farley said. “But you can’t just say that these folks are in the margins. These folks are in the center of power.”</font></div></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/14/group-allied-with-ginni-thomas-think-tank-threatens-armed-insurrection/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">http://www.blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/14/group-allied-with-ginni-thomas-think-tank-threatens-armed-insurrection/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">i think 404?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/14/group-allied-with-ginni-thomas-think-tank-threatens-armed-insurrection/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Group Allied With Ginni Thomas' Think Tank Threatens Armed Insurrection</a>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wayback no vid lnx
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">posted by Adele Stan</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
<span style="font-size: 11px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief</span><span style="font-size: 11px; font-style: italic; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.  </span>July 14,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> 2010</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Group Allied With Ginni Thomas’ Think Tank Threatens Armed Insurrection</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
<b>Liberty Central, the think tank founded and fronted by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sure seems to like men with guns.</b>

It was troubling enough to find, as AlterNet reported last week, that Liberty Central is allied with Gun Owners of America. (Our call for comment to Liberty Central’s spokesperson was never returned.)

Further exploration of the Liberty Central Web site finds the group claiming among its “friend” organizations the<b> Missouri Sovereignty Project, </b>whose Web site features a video (posted below) called “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Don’t Tread on Me” that shows several libertarian and right-wing figures threatening armed insurrection against the government if certain unspecified actions are taken. There is talk of usurpation of the people’s power by the state.</span>

Among them is Michael Badnarik, the 2004 Libertarian Party presidential candidate. The words, “WHAT SIDE WILL YOU STAND?” appear in gold on a black screen, and then Badnarik appears.

“I sincerely hope that enough people have crossed the personal line in the sand where they will join forces with the rest of us,” Badnarik says, “so that a small number of us are not required to use force and use of arms.”

Later in the video, which is a trailer for a full-length DVD, a man who is not identified but appears to be standing in front of a government building, says, “The time when you have to defend yourself from the government is when the law becomes lawless…” After a few frames of a hip-looking woman with pink hair saying that she will never “take a mandatory vaccination,” the editor takes us back to the scene of the man in front of the government building. “There might be shootin’ that day,” he says.

The Missouri Sovereignty Project promotes its own involvement with the film and urges Web site visitors to purchase a copy, with this line appearing above the video player:

The Missouri Sovereignty Project was privileged to be part of this excellent production.  Go here to buy your copy.

The film was written by William Lewis and Gary Franchi, directed by Lewis and produced by Franchi. They’re the team that brought you the film, “Camp FEMA,” a propaganda vehicle for a favorite right-wing conspiracy theory that asserts the government is creating internment camps for the unlawful detention of ordinary Americans.

Both “Camp FEMA” and “Don’t Tread on Me” feature 9/11 truther Alex Jones. (Lewis has  two 9/11-themed productions of his own, “911 Ripple Effect,” and “911 In Plane Site.”) But more fascinating — and disturbing — than that is what his latest endeavor, “Don’t Tread on Me”, tells us about what’s going on in state legislatures around the country.

“Don’t Tread on Me” features four Missouri state legislators and one Oklahoma state senator who appear to be allied with the Patriot movement and comfortable with a call to arms.

Really, should the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice — one of the most powerful government officials in the United States — be fronting an organization officially allied with groups that state their support for taking up arms against the government?

<b>As we reported last week, Larry Pratt, executive director of Liberty Central “friend” Gun Owners of America, recently appeared to call for war on the U.S. government at 2nd Amendment rally convened on the grounds of the Washington Monument on April 19th — the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.</b> (Pratt also addressed a meeting of white supremacists in 1992.)

Yes, it’s Ginni Thomas’ First Amendment right to associate with whomever she pleases, and it’s the right of all of her organization’s featured “friends” to state their views. But is this a morally okay thing? Isn’t it a kind of dangerous thing? Then why no outcry from progressives over this?

<b>Liberty Central is the latest addition to what I call Tea Party Inc. — the coalition of AstroTurf groups, right-wing media</b> and insider king-makers bent on harnessing the energy of the grassroots Tea Party movement. Tea Party Inc. has oodles and oddles of money that it’s dying to spend in the upcoming 2010 election, and in all sorts of activities (like the 2nd Annual September 12 Taxpayers’ March on Washington).
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
As Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel reported last week, Ginni Thomas says she’s seeking, through Liberty Central, to bridge the gap between the grassroots Tea Party movement and the established players in Washington politics.</span>

The big money groups of Tea Party Inc. have so far pledged to spend at least $61 million in the congressional mid-term elections. Does anybody care that the lady building the bridge between them and the grassroots has a power pedigree and is aligned with armed, anti-government forces?

Here’s the trailer for “Don’t Tread on Me,” as featured on the Web site of the Missouri Sovereignty Project, which is listed as a “friend” of Liberty Central, the think tank headed by Ginni Thomas.

The people interviewed in the trailer are not identified on-screen, but the cast list is as follows: <b>Alex Jones</b>, Michael Badnarik, Oklahoma State Rep. Charles Key, Richard Mack, R.J. Harris, Edwin Vieira, Missouri State Rep. Cynthia Davis, Missouri State Senator Brian Neives, Missouri State Senator Gary Nodler, Missouri State Senator Jim Lembke, Stephen Shute, Jason Littlejohn, Randy Stufflebeam, Justin Sane, Josh Carter, <b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Tom DeWeese</span> </b>Thomas Grady, James Lane and Tracy Ward.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100717101339/http://www.libertycentral.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Liberty Central</a>, the think tank founded and fronted by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sure seems to like men with guns.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was troubling enough to find, as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100717101339/http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/147464/tea_party_think_tank_headed_by_clarence_thomas%27_wife_makes_common_cause_with_militia_guru_larry_pratt/?page=entire" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">AlterNet reported</a> last week, that Liberty Central is allied with Gun Owners of America. (Our call for comment to Liberty Central’s spokesperson was never returned.)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Further exploration of the Liberty Central Web site finds the group claiming among its <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100717101339/http://www.libertycentral.org/friends-of-liberty-central" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“friend” organizations</a> the Missouri Sovereignty Project, whose <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100717101339/http://www.missourisovereigntyproject.com/videos.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Web site</a> features a video (posted below) called “Don’t Tread on Me” that shows several libertarian and right-wing figures threatening armed insurrection against the government if certain unspecified actions are taken. There is talk of usurpation of the people’s power by the state.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">jbs sells</font></p><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">tom deweese</font></div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SUSTAINABLE: THE WAR ON FREE ENTERPRISE, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND INDIVIDUALS</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">$19.95</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Buy 2 for $17.95 each and save 11%</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">"Sustainable" serves as a hand book for property rights activists to organize opposition. It provides vital information to a news media that is basically clueless to these policies, and it provides a blue print for fighting back as it offers hope to those who are its victims.</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Sustainable: The WAR on Free Enterprise, Private Property and Individuals describes in detail the process being used at every level of government to reorganize our society under the excuse of environmental protection. Author Tom DeWeese pulls back the curtain to reveal the policies and the powers behind them that are systematically changing our culture and system of government to impose a political agenda of top-down control at every level. He provides invaluable insight as to how elected officials are pressured by an army of private organizations, planners and federal agencies, armed with federal grants to impose specific regulations in the name of Sustainable Development. Sustainable serves as a hand book for property rights activists to organize opposition. It provides vital information to a news media that is basically clueless to these policies, and it provides a blue print for fighting back as it offers hope to those who are its victims.</span></div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
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</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">---</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">blurb</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Tom DeWeese writes with a flair and the purpose of 'Common Sense' in a time when we dearly need some. - C.J. Hadley, publisher, RANGE magazine</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">One of America's best informed and most respected champions of free enterprise and principled government is Tom DeWeese. - Ron Arnold, author and executive vice president, Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Tom DeWeese is a vital force in the battle for American liberty because he tells it like it is, holding back nothing as he cuts through the politically-correct smokescreen to get out the truth. - Jerome Corsi, Author</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">From afar, I have long admired your courage and your immense talent for writing. You personally represent that which I admire above all else: the brave American patriot upon whom free people everywhere depend to save America from the Socialism that now threatens it and thereby the Free World. - Judi McLeod, Editor, CanadaFreePress.com</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Our country should always feel a great debt to people like Tom DeWeese and others, who literally make it their business to monitor what Washington is doing, where big government is taking us, and alerting us that "we the people" can still be in charge, if we're informed and active. Keep it up, Tom! - Pat Boone</div><div helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">treehugger primer:</font>

Agenda 21: The United Nations Threat To Control Our Lightbulbs, Our Lifestyles and Our Lives</p>

<p>

Lloyd Alter (@lloydalter)</p>

<p>

 </p>

<p>

I disagreed with TreeHugger Brian the other day, about what is driving the Tea Party madness in Washington. He said money; I said ideology. Here's why.</p>

<p>

In my spare time, I am active in the Heritage Preservation movement; I think old buildings and communities are more than relics from the past, they are templates for the future. For the last year I have been trying to determine the cause of a remarkable rise in the belief that property rights are sacrosanct, even in Canada where they were consipicuously left out of the constitution and have not ever really existed. Where heritage preservation used to be derided by many as conservative and reactionary, a bunch of old whiners trying to stop change, now it is suddenly socialist. The more I read, the more I kept coming up against a new term: Agenda 21. And it underpins the ideological opposition to everything from streetcars to planning to lightbulbs to climate change.The actual Agenda 21 document from the United Nations started goes back to Rio in1992 and is pretty innocuous, given that nobody really pays much attention to these things, and they are not exactly the law of the land. It includes goals such as:</p>

<p>

Reduce adverse effects on the atmosphere from the energy sector by promoting policies or programmes, as appropriate, to increase the contribution of environmentally sound and cost-effective energy systems, particularly new and renewable ones, through less polluting and more efficient energy production, transmission, distribution and use.</p>

<p>

Develop and promote, as appropriate, cost-effective, more efficient, less polluting and safer transport systems, particularly integrated rural and urban mass transit, as well as environmentally sound road networks, taking into account the needs for sustainable social, economic and development priorities, particularly in developing countries.</p>

<p>

But as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones recently posted in First They Came for the Lightbulbs, in the mind of a Michele Bachmann it becomes the intellectual basis for her war on lightbulb legislation.</p>

<p>

Interview with Tom DeWeese at CPAC 2011 on Vimeo.</p>

<p>

One of the main mouthpieces of the Agenda 21 conspiracy is Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center. In fact I think he is the American Policy Center. He explains Agenda 21 in One Easy Lesson, concentrating on Sustainable Development, and writes about how it is a growing movement:</p>

<p>

Awareness of Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development is racing across the nation as citizens in community after community are learning what their city planners are actually up to.</p>

<p>

He then proceeds to explain how just about everything this TreeHugger believes in is part of a plot.</p>

<p>

What is Sustainable Development?</p>

<p>

According to its authors, the objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity. Sustainablists insist that every societal decision be based on environmental impact, focusing on three components; global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction.</p>

<p>

Social Equity (Social injustice)</p>

<p>

Social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people "to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment." Redistribution of wealth. Private property is a social injustice since not everyone can build wealth from it. National sovereignty is a social injustice. All part of Agenda 21 policy.</p>

<p>

In fact, it seems that just about everything we write about on TreeHugger is an Agenda 21 plot.</p>

<p>

Local Sustainable Development policies</p>

<p>

Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, STAR Sustainable Communities, Green jobs, Green Building Codes, "Going Green," Alternative Energy, Local Visioning, facilitators, regional planning, historic preservation, conservation easements, development rights, sustainable farming, comprehensive planning, growth management.</p>

<p>

Well that certainly defines my agenda, the stuff I care about. Anything "green" or energy saving is evil, part of the agenda of control. Another writer attacks what I would call responsible planning, urban design and energy use:</p>

<p>

The entire picture is of an elaborate maze of deceit, meant to obscure the real intentions and, before most may learn otherwise, to ensnare the vast majority of people into a life of cramped, stack and pack housing, mandated public transportation use, serious restrictions on personal food, water, and energy use, and indoctrination of the youth into a socialistic and fascistic outlook on life generally.</p>

<p>

And why do people like me go on about the suburbs and the role of the automobile in our society? I have to repeat the whole very long paragraph.</p>

<p>

This may sound like an overreach, but consider that Agenda 21 defines what we Americans know as the "single family residence" - which is to say, the middle class suburb with tract homes, soccer moms driving mini-vans, and consumption of energy restricted only by the wallets of the homeowners themselves - as most definitely "unsustainable." It defines our "fixation" with the automobile - and hence the mobile freedom that comes along with it - as a "danger" to the Earth, due to the fact that they emit carbon and require the use of long stretches of asphalt roads and concrete highways. It defines our American standard of energy use - even though, on the whole, we recycle exponentially more than we did only a few decades ago - as similarly "unsustainable." Essentially, Agenda 21 envisions local communities all across our nation adopting "comprehensive community plans" that have as their real, though unstated, purpose the elimination of the very middle class quality of life, that has been the bedrock of our national independence and personal freedoms. In place of the suburb, it wants Soviet-style high density housing; changes in zoning laws that increasingly make it impossible to maintain single family residences (let alone build new ones); mandated use of public transportation (thus positioning the high density housing near railroad or bus depots and excluding from those "human residential zones" most roadways and parking installations); and severe limitations on private food, water, and energy consumption, in return for enormously high taxes that will fund "cradle to grave" care by the nanny government.</p>

<p>

Or, as one website summarized it,</p>

<p>

It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth.</p>

<p>

From an ideologue's point of view, Agenda 21 is a beautiful thing, the Theory of Everything. It ties it all together into one neat package, making climate change, light bulbs, transit, smart growth, fuel economy, everything a plot. I became concerned about it because it makes our work as historic preservationists more difficult, since we are now seen as socialist elitists trying take away property rights and stop economic growth, distributing the pleasure of admiring an old building among the many in the face of the right of the owner to do what he wants.</p>

<p>

But it is much more than my historic preservation or Michele's light bulbs. It is a spreading conspiracy theory that is becoming the underlying ideology of the crazy right and that has serious legs. It is no joke.</p>

<p>

More on Agenda 21 in TreeHugger:

Agenda 21 Scuttles Norwegian Whaling Vessel in Harbor: Fourth Ship Sunk in 12 Years

Transition Towns a "Conspiracy" to Take Your Land Away? (Video)

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So who is driving this bandwagon? John Laumer wrote John Birch Society Is Back: Municipal Planning & Environmentalism Targeted. Fred Koch, founder of Koch industries, was a founding member. He was also the father of the Koch Brothers who founded Americans for Prosperity. One of the <b>JBS's favorite experts on the threat of Agenda 21 is Tom DeWeese.</b></font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The latest tactics by the American Planning Association reveals the <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">dark intent of the Sustainablists </span>and the lengths they will go to hide their goals. Honest intent doesn’t have to hide in lies and double speak. Those are the tactics of tyranny".- Tom DeWeese</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Interview with Tom DeWeese at CPAC 2011 from The John Birch Society </span>on Vimeo. [co-sponsor one year?]</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American Policy Center</font></b></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When he is not out on the public speaking circuit<b>, Tom DeWeese is President of the American Policy Center, the </b><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>loudest mouthpiece of the anti-Agenda 21 crowd</b>.</span> He claims that the anti-sustainability movement is not just crazy people:<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> "The tin foil is falling off of our hats rapidly as the fight against Agenda 21 is quickly escalating into the main stream of the political debate."</span></font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has a <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">well-connected board of directors and advisors that includes:</span></font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bonner Cohen, </b>who, according to Sourcewatch, ran EPA watch, which was funded by Philip Morris and accused the EPA of "everything from destroying the US economy to trying to stop people from taking showers." He was the sole director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition with his partner <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Steve Milloy </span>of Junk Science fame. <b>TASSC</b> was funded by Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors and many more.</font></div>

</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>NCPPR</b>/Screen capture</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cohen is also senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which received $ 445,000 from ExxonMobil.</font></div>

</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>cfact</b>/Screen capture</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He is a senior policy analyst with the <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, </b>which gets most of its money from the Carthage Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation. Oh, and ExxonMobil</span>, to the tune of $ 577,000 between 2000 and 2007 according to ExxonSecrets.</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">John Meredith</b> is a director as well; he is a Washington lobbyist (and the son of civil rights icon James Meredith) and is on the Advisory Board of <b>CFACT.</b> He goes way back in the conspiracy, speaking in 1977, suggesting that there was:</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">    what he termed the "radical green agenda" to "restructure American society."</span> In particularly, he discussed a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (Community Sustainability: Agendas for Choice-Making and Action) which calls for the elimination of single-family dwellings, curbing suburbs, reducing the population's meat consumption, imposing population control techniques and more. This document, Meredith said, was submitted to the June 1996 "Habitat II" United Nations Conference in Istanbul as official U.S. policy.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His consulting company's skills include</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    The ability to motivate people into participating in the public policy process and providing them the tools to be effective when they do engage is a cornerstone of Meredith Advocacy Group services. Our grassroots techniques include creation of electronic distribution systems for issue education and action alerts, coalition building and coordination of like-minded groups and individuals, establishment and maintenance of key contacts, as well as Congressional and agency outreach programs.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Which is often called astroturfing.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Board of Advisors includes <b>Alan Caruba, </b>who is a major contributor of articles to CFACT, which, by the way, was a gold sponsor of the Heartland Conference on Climate Change, infamous for its Unabomber ads (along with Americans for Prosperity)</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Deweese</b> has other opinions to offer beside just Agenda 21; his thoughts on botany:</font></div>

</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    The bottom line is, CO2 is not a poison to human beings, CO2 is not affecting the atmosphere, there is absolutely no evidence, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I can say this with absolute confidence, there is no evidence of man-made global warming causing problems…..<b>Trees give off carbon dioxide; all the plants around us give it off.</b> The fact is some scientists have done some studies saying we’ve got a carbon dioxide shortage right now. That then causes plants to die, that causes environmental damage.</span></font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"When government makes decisions on behalf of others about how much consumption, what types of living arrangements, and what types of transportation are “sustainable,” this can directly conflict with individuals’ freedom."- <b>Americans for Prosperity</b></font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">afp/Screen capture</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans for Prosperity</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Far as the Koch's Americans For Prosperity goes, they hand out brochures about Agenda 21 </span>that are almost fair and balanced compared to some of the stuff I have read.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    Some conservatives worry that sustainable development is just a disguise for a larger scheme to adopt radical environmentalism, wealth redistribution, or some form of “world government” through local initiatives. But whether this is true is largely irrelevant: regardless of the underlying motives and regardless of the source, the policies themselves prove to be an affront to property rights and harmful to the American economy. To those who favor economic freedom and limited government, this alone is grounds for concern.</font></div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AFP branches from Kansas to Oregon appear to have Tom Deweese constantly on the rubber chicken circuit, he is everywhere.</font></span></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Under Sustainable Development, the recognition of the Unalienable Right to one’s life, liberty and property is lost. This war on freedom is a Global to Local one."- Freedom Advocates</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freedom Advocates/Screen capture</font></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freedom Advocates</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The other organization that seems to do the most pushing of the Agenda 21 conspiracy is <b>Freedom Advocates, run by Patrick M. Wood</b>, who in the late seventies was <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">obsessed with the Trilateral Commission</span>, the conspiracy du jour. Information about him is sketchy, and there is little on any of his board members; they all appear to be<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> big in Santa Cruz, California</span>. He offers a downloadable handbook that tells you everything you need to know to scupper an urban planner and keep government small enough to drown in a bathtub.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    1. Recognize and resist the trend to replace political boundaries with “regional governance.” Recognize that this form of government leads to a breakdown of accountability to the citizenry.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    2. Refuse local government receipt of federal or state money for new Sustainable Development programs because they breach the American system of federalism and raid the treasury. Withdraw from established Sustainable Development programs.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    3. Avoid local government partnerships with the federal government, NGOs, foundations and corporations that advance the anti-liberty Sustainable Development agenda. Do not surrender your town or county to the insider privilege of Sustainable Developers and their monied interests….</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    6. Kick ICLEI out of your town.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their website is published on The Patriot's Web, a hosting company for right wing websites, which is owned by the August Corporation, which is owned by Patrick Wood, who also publishes the August Forecast and Review. He appears to be a one man media empire, but so far as I can tell, not the major force behind the Agenda 21 conspiracy.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the end, there was no direct link from the Koch's Americans for Prosperity to any of the people I could find on the boards of either organization. Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies thinks there might be one, writing:</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    It isn't difficult to understand why the men behind Koch Industries -- a major emitter of carbon and other pollution -- would be interested in discrediting a sustainability initiative.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">    For example, the Koch’s have been major funders of efforts to discredit climate science in order to scuttle regulatory action on greenhouse gas pollution. A 2010 Greenpeace report documented how the Kochs contributed more than $48.5 million from 1997 to 2008 to a network of several dozen think tanks that work to sow doubt about manmade climate change.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">apc/Screen capture</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is pretty clear that there are <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">direct connections from the American Policy Center to The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, (CFACT</span> , which is funded by right wing foundations and big oil, not to mention Daimler Chrysler and Ford in the past.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is also clear that the anti-agenda 21, anti-sustainability movement is punching way above its weight in terms of public awareness and support. It's not a grass roots movement of concerned local activists, but, as Robin Rather puts it, "a brilliant campaign, preying on real fears that people have" about their homes and property.</font></div>

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<div class="field-label-inline-first" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; display: inline; font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Date of Birth<span class="colon" style=" line-height: 1.25em;">:</span> </font></div>

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<div class="field-label-inline-first" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; display: inline; font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Location<span class="colon" style=" line-height: 1.25em;">:</span> </font></div>

<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Marshall, VA.</div>

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<div class="field-label-inline-first" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25em; display: inline; font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ideology<span class="colon" style=" line-height: 1.25em;">:</span> </font></div>

<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/patriot-movememnt" style=" line-height: 1.25em; text-decoration: none;">Patriot Movement</a></div>

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<p style=" font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.25em; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For 20 years now, </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Tom DeWeese</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> has been on a jihad against global plans for sustainable development. What to most of us looks like an innocuous and voluntary United Nations-led effort to use our resources more wisely — Agenda 21 — is really “international forces … turning [American] communities into little soviets.”</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent,” the founder and president of the American Policy Center wrote in a 2009 report. “But the devastation to our liberty and way of life is the same as if Lenin ordered it.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is really a “complete agenda of control,” he said, has been wrapped “in a nice green blanket, scaring us with horror stories about the human destruction of the environment — and so we are now throwing our liberties on the bonfire like a good old fashioned book burning — all in the name of protecting the planet.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Agenda 21 plan DeWeese rails on about was developed in 1992 at a UN meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and signed by 178 world leaders including then-President George H.W. Bush. It amounts to a set of “smart growth” principles, a plan to deal with overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion. It is wholly voluntary — neither a treaty nor a legally binding agreement.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Serving on the board of DeWeese’s American Policy Center are Alan Caruba, the center’s communications director who also blogs for Tea Party Nation, the only Tea Party the SPLC lists as a hate group; Sam Rohrer, a former Pennsylvania state legislator; and John Meredith, son of civil rights hero James Meredith.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeWeese’s outfit is only one of several obsessed with what has become one of the main conspiracy theories of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. Others include the far-right John Birch Society, the anti-feminist Eagle Forum, a group called Texans for Accountable Government, former Fox News host Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones, a Texas radio show host and über-conspiracy theorist.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeWeese, who says he has been the editor of two newspapers and a candidate for the Ohio legislature, has managed to spread his propaganda into the Tea Parties and elsewhere. Just last year, he says, he spoke to 38 groups in 12 states.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The effect of the fear-mongering fairy tale offered up by DeWeese and other conspiracy theorists has been almost unbelievable.</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Not only have some counties passed resolutions opposing Agenda 21 (along with the Tennessee House of Representatives), but the Republican National Committee (RNC) in January passed one as well, decrying Agenda 21’s “destructive strategies for ‘sustainable development.’” The RNC recommended that the resolution be adopted as part of the Republican platform at its August 2012 convention.</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" line-height: 20px;"><b>Republican Platform Opposes Agenda 21</b></span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" line-height: 20px;">By LESLIE KAUFMAN  AUGUST 29, 2012 11:40 AM August 29, 2012</span></font>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" line-height: 20px;">The G.O.P. platform approved Tuesday in Florida included tough language on many expected issues like abortion, but also takes a stand on an issue that has historically been out of the party’s mainstream: Agenda 21.</span></font></p>

<p>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" line-height: 20px;">“We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty, and we oppose any form of U.N. Global Tax,” the platform reads.</span></font></p>

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<p><a href="http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/republican-platform-opposes-agenda-21/?r=0"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/republican-platform-opposes-agenda-21/?r=0</font></a>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">demented:</font></div>

<div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She frequently cites “Redevelopment: The Unknown Government,” by Chris Norby, a centrist Republican of the California State Assembly , as an influence, but “The Unknown Government” is by no means a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. In bland, legal detail, the book describes:</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…the distortions caused by the fiscalization of land use, eminent domain abuse, and sales tax competition that results in big-box stores, car dealerships, and sports teams demanding special tax breaks from cities.</font></div>

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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Or, essentially, how private companies abuse loopholes in land-use law to the detriment of the community.</font></p>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But rather than accuse private redevelopment interests of false blight claims, Koire associates them with the overarching government interest in controlling people’s lives. She turns what would be a good example of property rights abuse in the interests of private industry into an argument in favor of less regulation of private industry, support for big-box developments, and an opportunity to rail against communitarianism—a sort of localized version of communism.</font></span></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What she sees as Kabuki theater in action may simply be a description of how city councils tend to ignore her conspiratorial rantings when she shows up with bullhorns and video cameras to declare the whole meeting a masquerade.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How these ideas get uniformly promulgated can be traced to <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Tom Deweese</b> at the American Policy Center</span>, a small think tank out of Warrenton, Virginia, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">which previously worked to fund the Contras in Nicaragua and distribute a Philip Morris-funded newsletter that accused the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) of being controlled by environmental terrorists  in the wake of the EPA’s 1992 decision to regulate secondhand smoke.</span></font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Deweese has been ringing a demagogic alarm about Agenda 21 since the ’92 UN Summit in Rio, but only with the Tea Party’s rise have his ideas really taken root. </span>His Deweese Report newsletter, which he claims reaches over three million recipients by <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">email and direct mail c</span>ampaigns, is now solely focused on the threat of sustainable development and the UN’s slowly encroaching power. The issues covered range from the insidiousness of stakeholders in public-private partnerships to the looming threat of new urbanism.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Deweese’s book, Now Tell Me I Was Wrong, we are in the “darkest ages of human history,” ready to face a new Inquisition. The tactics the Nazis used to eliminate the Jews are the same ones being used “in every city council meeting, county commissioner meetings, state government hearing and Congressional hearing in this nation to impose Agenda 21.”</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[</font><span style=" font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;">Deweese’s book, Now Tell Me I Was Wrong, </span><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.amazon.com/Now-Tell-Me-Was-Wrong/dp/1456848127</font></div>

<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">xlibris publ</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sustainable development is the cornerstone of all government and the root of all our problems. Bono is a Marxist that is not actually interested in helping Africa, since debt relief would be disruptive to the continent’s economies. Bill Gates wants to depopulate the planet with vaccination initiatives. The White House Rural Council is here to create a land czar dictatorship over the countryside. The $4 billion-dollar environmental non-profit world controls the government and big business. The Department of Homeland Security categorizes extremists as “anyone concerned about the economy,” and smart growth will construct inescapable, walled cities that nobody can escape.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He cites <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ayn Rand’</span>s novella Anthem as a major influence; the book envisions a dystopian future where we will all be nameless hordes contained to controlled palaces of mating and die in the “home of the useless,” all overseen by the Elders.</font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Deweese also sells an anti-Agenda 21 kit on his site (for $195), which includes packets of information on how you too can fight sustainable planning in your neighborhood, and introspections into how the U.S. education system and the Affordable Care Act are all part of the same diabolical plan. The<b> infamous Agenda 21 “death map”</b> is on the back cover.</font></div>

</div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/07/florida-tea-party-secret-manatee-conspiracy  agenda 21 Beck

...Agenda 21 paranoia has swept the tea party scene, driving activists around the country to delve into the minutiae of local governance. And now that the midterm elections are over, they're descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy.

Virginia activist Donna Holt is among those who believe that Agenda 21—unveiled during the UN's "Earth Summit" in 1992—is really a plot to curtail private property rights and deprive Americans of precious constitutional freedoms. In reality, the document will do nothing of the sort, but it has nevertheless been the target of conspiracy-minded UN haters for years. Holt and other tea partiers are taking their cues from people like Henry Lamb, a WorldNetDaily columnist and founder of Sovereignty International and Freedom21, groups designed to fight Agenda 21 and its ilk. He has been arguing for decades that the UN is secretly plotting to herd humans into crowded cities so that the rest of the world can be devoted to wildlife preservation. (Lamb declined to comment for this story because back Mother Jones once included him in a story called Wingnuts in Sheep's Clothing, and another article that described his role in Astroturf lobbying against the Kyoto treaty.)

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Holt has also has relied on the research of Tom DeWeese,</span> the founder of the American Policy Center and a climate change denier whose group has been funded by Exxon. DeWeese's organization hosted a conference in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, this summer attended by many tea partiers, which featured sessions on Agenda 21. Schooled by such activists, Holt, the Virginia coordinator of Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, has set to work spreading the word about Agenda 21 and the evils of sustainable development. She's finding a very receptive audience among tea party groups, who she believes are going to make sustainable development the next target of their activism...

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treehugger:</font></div>

"The latest tactics by the American Planning Association reveals the dark intent of the Sustainablists and the lengths they will go to hide their goals. Honest intent doesn’t have to hide in lies and double speak. Those are the tactics of tyranny".- Tom DeWeese

Interview with Tom DeWeese at CPAC 2011 from The John Birch Society on Vimeo.

American Policy Center

When he is not out on the public speaking circuit, Tom DeWeese is President of the American Policy Center, the loudest mouthpiece of the anti-Agenda 21 crowd. He claims that the anti-sustainability movement is not just crazy people: "The tin foil is falling off of our hats rapidly as the fight against Agenda 21 is quickly escalating into the main stream of the political debate."

He has a well-connected board of directors and advisors that includes:

Bonner Cohen, who, according to Sourcewatch, ran EPA watch, which was funded by Philip Morris and accused the EPA of "everything from destroying the US economy to trying to stop people from taking showers." He was the sole director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition with his partner Steve Milloy of Junk Science fame. TASSC was funded by Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors and many more.

NCPPR/Screen capture

Cohen is also senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which received $ 445,000 from ExxonMobil.

cfact/Screen capture

He is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which gets most of its money from the Carthage Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation. Oh, and ExxonMobil, to the tune of $ 577,000 between 2000 and 2007 according to ExxonSecrets.

John Meredith is a director as well; he is a Washington lobbyist (and the son of civil rights icon James Meredith) and is on the Advisory Board of CFACT. He goes way back in the conspiracy, speaking in 1977, suggesting that there was:

    what he termed the "radical green agenda" to "restructure American society." In particularly, he discussed a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (Community Sustainability: Agendas for Choice-Making and Action) which calls for the elimination of single-family dwellings, curbing suburbs, reducing the population's meat consumption, imposing population control techniques and more. This document, Meredith said, was submitted to the June 1996 "Habitat II" United Nations Conference in Istanbul as official U.S. policy.

His consulting company's skills include

    The ability to motivate people into participating in the public policy process and providing them the tools to be effective when they do engage is a cornerstone of Meredith Advocacy Group services. Our grassroots techniques include creation of electronic distribution systems for issue education and action alerts, coalition building and coordination of like-minded groups and individuals, establishment and maintenance of key contacts, as well as Congressional and agency outreach programs.

Which is often called astroturfing.

The Board of Advisors includes Alan Caruba, who is a major contributor of articles to CFACT, which, by the way, was a gold sponsor of the Heartland Conference on Climate Change, infamous for its Unabomber ads (along with Americans for Prosperity)

Deweese has other opinions to offer beside just Agenda 21; his thoughts on botany:

    The bottom line is, CO2 is not a poison to human beings, CO2 is not affecting the atmosphere, there is absolutely no evidence, I can say this with absolute confidence, there is no evidence of man-made global warming causing problems…..Trees give off carbon dioxide; all the plants around us give it off. The fact is some scientists have done some studies saying we’ve got a carbon dioxide shortage right now. That then causes plants to die, that causes environmental damage.

"When government makes decisions on behalf of others about how much consumption, what types of living arrangements, and what types of transportation are “sustainable,” this can directly conflict with individuals’ freedom."- Americans for Prosperity

Americans for Prosperity

As Far as the Koch's Americans For Prosperity goes, they hand out brochures about Agenda 21 that are almost fair and balanced compared to some of the stuff I have read.

    Some conservatives worry that sustainable development is just a disguise for a larger scheme to adopt radical environmentalism, wealth redistribution, or some form of “world government” through local initiatives. But whether this is true is largely irrelevant: regardless of the underlying motives and regardless of the source, the policies themselves prove to be an affront to property rights and harmful to the American economy. To those who favor economic freedom and limited government, this alone is grounds for concern.

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">AFP branches from Kansas to Oregon appear to have Tom Deweese constantly on the rubber chicken circuit</span>, he is everywhere.

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<a href="http://americanpolicy.org/">http://americanpolicy.org/</a></font></div>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www<b>.splcenter.o</b>rg/get-informed/publications/Agenda-21/The-Players-Anti-Agenda-21-Activists</font></div>

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<p style=" margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; line-height: 16.2481479644775px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Agenda 21, the 1992 United Nations plan for sustainable development that was signed by the leaders of 178 of the world’s 196 countries, is not binding and has no power to force any action at all. Nevertheless, in the hands of a dedicated cadre of far-right conspiracy theorists, it has been depicted as a key step in a secret plan to destroy property rights, redistribute wealth and, ultimately, force the United States and other countries in a tyrannical, one-world government in which bicycle paths and wildlife refuges will be vastly more important than human beings. What follows are brief portraits of 11 of the leading anti-Agenda 21 groups and their leaders.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The American Policy Center, which focuses on “environmental policy and its effect on private property rights” and “the United Nations and its effect on American national sovereignty,” was founded by Tom DeWeese</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> in 1988. DeWeese was one of the very first on the radical right, if not the first, to attack the UN’s Agenda 21 plan, starting almost immediately after its adoption at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeWeese doesn’t mince words. He has described Agenda 21 as a “blueprint to turn your community into a little soviet,” pushed along by “a hoard [sic] of non-governmental organizations” that pressure elected officials to endorse the plan and enforce it through “non-elected boards, councils and regional governments.” “It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth,” he adds.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent,” DeWeese wrote in a 2009 report. “But the devastation to our liberty and way of life is the same as if Lenin ordered it.” The plan, he adds, is a “complete agenda of control” that has been “wrapped in a green blanket, scaring us with horror stories about the destruction of the environment — and so we are now throwing our liberties on the bonfire like a good old fashioned book burning — all in the name of protecting the planet.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">For years, DeWeese’s center was the chief sponsor of “Freedom 21,” an annual conference of opponents of the plan that have attracted well-known right-wing extremists like Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum (see below); Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media; Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily; Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates (see below); and Michael Coffman of Environmental Perspectives Inc. (</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see below).</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeWeese, who has been close to a number of those in the Tea Party movement, offers an array of videos on his website backing up his contentions, along with DeWeese essays with titles like “‘Sustainable Development’: The Evil Facing America” and “Putting Bicycles Ahead of People.” His center also publishes “The DeWeese Report,” occasional special reports, and legislative updates.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Constitution Party was founded in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party by the late Howard Phillips,</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> who ran for president three times without ever gaining more than 0.19% of the vote. It is an essentially theocratic party, saying that its goal “is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” It opposes almost all immigration, abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and the federal income tax.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The party, which at one point absorbed the American Independent Party (the vehicle for segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s own 1968 run for the presidency), is also very much against U.S. participation in international institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as foreign aid.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So it wasn’t much of a surprise when, in 2012, the group took a position on Agenda 21 that described it as “a comprehensive plan of utopian environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” The resolution went on to say the plan was being “covertly advanced in local communities” and would attack private ownership of homes, farms and cars “as destructive to the environment.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It also described Agenda 21 as leading to “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth” — words almost identical to those used by the <b>Republican National Committee, which also denounced Agenda 21 in its own January 2012 resolution.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The plan has been repeatedly denounced at the local level by the Constitution Party as well. Bernie De Castro, the party’s Florida chairman, said: “Agenda 21 is the most dangerous threat to America’s sovereignty that is coming at us like a whirlwind and yet so few Americans are aware of this diabolical threat to them and their families.” The Hollywood, Fla., chapter invited Rosa Koire of Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 (see below) to speak at its June 2012 meeting.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The party’s Arizona chapter recently produced its own resolution on the plan: “We call for a return to the states and to the people all lands which are held by the federal government without authorization by the Constitution.” And its Allegheny County, Pa., chapter urged its members to attend a March 2012 presentation by the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society (see below) on Agenda 21.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Richard Mack, who won fame on the far right for successfully challenging some aspects of the Brady gun control bill in the 1990s, formed the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Assocation (CSPOA</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">) in 2011 with the goal of uniting law enforcement officers to defend the Constitution with “an emphasis on State Sovereignty and local autonomy.” As a practical matter, that means Mack has pushed the baseless theory that local sheriffs can nullify federal laws.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That antagonism to centralized power made the tough-talking Mack, who was once the public relations director for the </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">extremist group Gun Owners of America</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, a natural adherent to ideas about the supposedly nefarious nature of Agenda 21. In fact, at the CSPOA’s first annual convention, held in January 2012 in Las Vegas, Mack hosted Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center (see above), who spoke to the gathering on “Agenda 21 & the International Redistribution of Wealth.”</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joining DeWeese in his criticism of the UN plan were three sheriffs: Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Ore.; Gill Gilbertson of Josephine County, Ore.; and Jon Lopey of Siskiyou County, Calif. The sheriffs reiterated complaints, fairly common in the West, about the large proportion of land controlled by the federal government and logging, mineral extraction and grazing rights on public lands, and related them to Agenda 21 and its alleged attack on private property rights in America.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This land is our land,” said Gilbertson. “Feds have no jurisdiction!”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CSPOA’s interest in killing Agenda 21 was not limited to that convention. In June 2013, the organization held a similar session during its second annual conference. It was headlined “Nullify Now: Expose and Reject NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a number of emergency detention measures disliked by many on both right and left]/Agenda 21.” Among the presenters for the session were Michael Coffman of Environmental Perspectives Inc. (see below) and Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center (see above).</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Declaration Alliance was founded in 1996 by three-time presidential candidate and former U.S. Foreign Service officer <b>Alan Keyes</b>, a protégé of President Reagan who has moved further and further to the right over the years. </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Alliance says it is dedicated to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but focuses heavily on gun rights, the “right to life” (Keyes opposes abortion in virtually all cases), and the repeal of the federal income tax.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the years, Keyes has adopted a whole series of highly controversial positions, saying that Jesus Christ would not have voted for Barack Obama, who he called a “radical communist” with a forged birth certificate; that homosexuality is nothing more than “selfish hedonism”; that state-sanctioned prayer should be allowed in public schools; that evolution is a false theory; and, during a stint as a U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, that he did not support the UN.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Keyes first came out against Agenda 21 in a 2011 blog post that charged that the government was allowing the UN to take over American treasures by designating them World Heritage Sites. He returned to the plan in an alarming 2012 fundraising letter: “Enemies who hate America, despise liberty, and want the United States transformed … into socialism, are relentlessly advancing a seditious new plan — Agenda 21 — to make our nation a vassal of the United Nations.” He went on to say that it was “the most aggressive and ambitious attack on our nation to be put forward by the UN one-worlders” and theorized that it would result in the confiscation of farms, the end of private property and a ban on private ownership of cars.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kirk MacKenzie, a business adviser and former broker, formed Defend Rural America at an October 2011 meeting in Yreka, Calif., held to fight American Indians and environmentalists who wanted to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River to help bring back the once-thriving salmon population. Although the group did not win that battle —the dams’ removal now seems likely — MacKenzie said the meeting had established a “new standard for grassroots activism.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The organization is not solely focused on Agenda 21, although sustainable development and its alleged perils are discussed. Nita Still, a Montague, Calif., anti-Agenda 21 activist has pilloried the plan in searing terms on MacKenzie’s site, saying it “means the destruction of our lives” at the hands of “the Soulless Ones,” by which she seems to mean globalist environmentalists who believe in planning.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sustainability, she writes, will mean taking “55% of the land for flora, fauna, rivers, streams and wetlands because they are Persons with Rights … thousands of new housing, stacked upon each other in the Bay Area because the rural areas will be herded down the road to urbanism and their population decimated.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Still has a particularly conspiracist bent, taking on many of the bogeymen of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement in her rants about Agenda 21. She says the plan reflects “the desires of the Illuminati and the Committee of 300, plus the Club of Rome, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, The Skull and Bones or the Order 322 and the Trilateral Commission” and more.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“They have planned for the whole world to have 90% of the population murdered by abortion and aborting life by disease, famine, wars, wrecking of the economy, industry, technology, giving vaccines and medicines which cause disease and a slow death,” she writes. She adds in her essay that proponents “can also manipulate the weather and cause earthquakes [and] volcanic eruptions.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The planners, she said, are “more concerned with animals and the environment over human beings.” She adds that the “United Nations is a front for all that is happening in our lives,” aided by a group of international bankers.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The vast majority of opponents of Agenda 21 come from the right, mostly the far right. But in the case of Rosa Koire (pronounced CORE-ee), a self-described lesbian feminist and longtime forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain evaluation, the criticism is ostensibly coming from the left.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The main difference between Koire, who runs the Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 website and is executive director of the closely linked Post Sustainability Institute, is that she says the UN wants to “erect Communitarianism” — as opposed to socialism, or communism — “as the dominant form of world governance.” Communitarianism is a system of cooperative groups that practice some communist principles but are generally less centralized than historic communist states. She also claims that the Democratic Party has been hijacked by socialists.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After that, Koire sounds like most Agenda 21 fearmongers. “[Y]our local government is in the process of controlling where and how you live, what you eat, what your children learn, and what laws you will live under.” She also says on her website that the Agenda 21 plan means “to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koire authored a 2011 book, <i style=" line-height: 1.25em;">Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21,</i> where she says the plan aims “to protect the rights of future generations and all species against the potential crimes of the present.” She says “the rights of the individual are called selfish and those who would fight for them [are] slurred as immoral.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like right-wing critics, she sees the plan as aiming to create regional governmental bodies (such as the European Union) as merely “an interim stop on the road to globalization” that will eventually lead to a one-world government.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Eagle Forum was formed in 1975 by conservative anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly,</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> who created it out of the remnants of her Stop ERA group, which opposed the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The group has long been involved in a wide array of highly conservative causes, many of them having to do with with women and the family — opposition to abortion, sex education in public schools, working mothers and feminism in general. It also favors English as our official language, assimilation of immigrants, and the right to bear arms. Finally, it opposes international oversight by the United Nations.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that vein, the Eagle Forum came out relatively recently against Agenda 21, forming the Agenda 21 Task Force to lead the battle. The forum says Agenda 21 seeks to destroy “the morals of our nation,” diminish the role of parents, boost communist values, and, ultimately, turn America into a communistic state.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The UN, the group says, wants to impose taxes to build a huge operating fund that will, in the end, help turn the organization into a “de facto world government.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Eagle Forum hosted a conference on Agenda 21 in Sacramento, Calif., in 2012.</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Speakers included Michael Coffman of Environmental Perspectives Inc. (see below), Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates (see below) and several sheriffs.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, wrote in a 2012 newsletter that “Agenda 21 DENIES the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of property rights and DISAGREES with America’s Founders that fee men operating within free markets are the best stewards of the earth.” “Americans are at a crossroads,” she added. “In November, we must replace all elected officials who support Agenda 21 with those who choose FREEDOM.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Michael Coffman founded Environmental Perspectives Inc. in 1992 as an “educational-research organization” that aimed “to sound a warning to America and the Christian church of serious threats to our freedom.” More specifically, the group focuses on the dangers of “</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">insidious property rights infringements.”</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The effort on the part of the international community to create a world government and religion has far reaching implications,” the group says on its website. “Our goal is to help people understand the consequences to them and our nation if our politics are driven by a belief that big government is the answer to everything and that nature is god and humans are destroying it.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffman has written several books on related subjects: <i style=" line-height: 1.25em;">Environmental Perspectives: The Dawn of Aquarius or the Twilight of a New Dark Age; Saviors of the Earth: The Politics and Religion of the Environmental Movement; The Birth of World Government;</i> and <i style=" line-height: 1.25em;">Dreamkillers,</i> “a fast-paced novel that provides the horrifying saga of how a town in Maine savaged a sick widow in order to take her land by using smart growth regulations.” He has also produced several similar DVDs, including “Global Warming: Emerging Science and Understanding,” which claims to explain “that man literally cannot be causing global warming.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffman also offers copies of a DVD entitled “Endgame” produced by Alex Jones, America’s leading conspiracy theorist. According to Coffman’s blurb, it “penetrates the history of the global elite’s effort to create world government.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Originally called Freedom 21 Santa Cruz, <b>Freedom Advocates</b> was founded in 2000 by Michael Shaw,</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> who says he had earlier participated in the Local Agenda 21 program run by Santa Cruz County, Calif., during the 1990s.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shaw’s group focuses on the idea that Agenda 21 “is being implemented on the local level in order to establish a collectivist world government.” It claims that under the plan, “political recognition of inalienable rights is denied.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shaw was long a regular at the “Freedom 21” conferences hosted by Tom DeWeese’s American Policy Center (see above), attending in 2007, 2008 and 2009.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Environmentalism is not about saving nature,” Shaw said at the 2008 conference. “It’s about a revolutionary coup in America. It is to establish global governance and abandon the principles of natural law.” He predicted that sustainable development policies will require a “police state” and ultimately “turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2012, Shaw appeared on the propaganda video “Behold a Pale Horse,” which featured far-right country singer Charlie Daniels.</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> “America is in peril,” Shaw said in fairly typical remarks. “A globalist regime has begun undertaking a transformation of what is America.” Later, he got down to specifics.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The only way this is going to be defeated is to understand the nature of what has enveloped our country,” he said, adding that Agenda 21, along with its many other nefarious aspects, calls for an 85% reduction in the population.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Heritage Foundation, </b><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">created in 1973 by three arch-conservatives discontented with President Richard Nixon’s embrace of big government, grew over the decades to the point that </span><i style=" line-height: 1.25em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The New York Times</i><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> once labeled it “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” Since former Sen. Jim </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeMint </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(R-S.C.) took over from leader Edwin Feulner in April 2013, it has grown more conservative still.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The group says in its mission statement that it was founded to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” Starting in 2011, it began to take on Agenda 21 as well.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That year, it described the UN plan as being part of a vast power grab.</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> It has also described how zoning policies related to the plan “limited real estate development to higher-cost homes in order to ‘price out’ moderate-income households, which included a disproportionate share of minorities.” It warned that the plan’s unwelcome effects were being felt at the local as well as national levels.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A paper published by the foundation in 2011, authored by Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt and Brett D. Schaefer, warned that Agenda 21 advocates “work to impose land use regulations that would force Americans into denser living arrangements, curtail freedom of choice in housing … and compel people to pay more for their houses and give up their cars” for public transportation and bikes.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" line-height: 16.2481479644775px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">[</font><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" line-height: 16.2481479644775px;">http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/12/focus-on-agenda-21-should-not-divert-attention-from-homegrown-anti-growth-policies]</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after founding the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1958, wealthy businessman Robert Welch set the tone for his archconservative organization for decades to come when he accused his fellow Republican, President Dwight Eisenhower, of being a commie patsy. By the early 1960s, JBS, the grouchy grandpa of the far right, was also attacking the United Nations as a den of socialists, communists and insiders plotting to take over America.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So it should come as no surprise that these days the Birchers are at the head of the paranoid parade marching against Agenda 21,</span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> the non-binding UN resolution passed and signed by more than 170 world leaders, including another American Republican president, George H.W. Bush.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Agenda 21 seeks for the government to curtail your freedom of travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas, and raise a family,” the society charges on its website. “Furthermore, it would eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Choose Freedom,” the website declares. “Stop Agenda 21.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From its headquarters in Appleton, Wis., about two miles from where the remains of serial libeler and Sen. Joseph McCarthy are buried, the society produces slick anti-Agenda 21 pamphlets and DVDs, shipping them to JBS chapters and supporters across the country. The society also relies on staffers like Hal Shurtleff to get the anti-Agenda 21 word out.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An Army veteran and father of five, Shurtleff is the indefatigable field director of the Birch Society on the East Coast. Since 2011, not long after JBS began its anti-Agenda 21 crusade in earnest, Shurtleff has conducted more than 70 presentations in public libraries, rec center basements and hotel conference rooms about the perils to freedom of Agenda 21.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From California to Maine, other JBS chapter leaders have been doing the same.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We have established a good network of freedom activists who know how to identify Agenda 21 initiatives,” Shurtleff says. “We use Facebook, social media and E-mails. There are dozens of Facebook pages dedicated to Agenda 21 as well as hundreds of Tea Party type groups.”</font></p>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TOM DEWEESE</font></div>

<div>Tom DeWeese has built a career on conspiratorial warnings about Agenda 21, a completely voluntary United Nations set of principles for sustainable resource management. Where others see sensible environmental guidelines, DeWeese finds sinister land-grabbing socialist UN initiatives that threaten national sovereignty, private property rights and freedom, not to mention turning our children into one-world government zombies.</div>

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<div>EXTREMIST INFO</div>

<div>Location Marshall, Va.</div>

<div>Ideology Antigovernment Movement</div>

<div>About Tom DeWeese</div>

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<div>In His Own Words</div>

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<div>“You've heard the term 'social justice.' It's being used everywhere today. First of all, 'social justice' was coined by Karl Marx, and to me, that says all I need to know about what social justice is. … According to sustainable development literature, it is a social injustice for a country to have borders because, they say, it stops the natural migration of people. Second, it is a social injustice to own private property. Why? Because some people … build wealth from ownership of private property, and others do not.”</div>

<div>—Interview with As Maine Goes, 2009 </div>

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<div>“Sustainable Development is code for a policy designed to transform human society, essentially eliminating individual life decisions and replacing them with top-down, one-size-fits-all government control. In steady fashion, the agenda for this new policy, designed at the international level, is put into place piece by piece with a new government council here, and new regulation there, each designed to appear as a ‘local’ development program. Like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot, many Americans fail to notice the rise in government heat.”</div>

<div>—American Policy Center column, April 2013</div>

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<div>“[Farmworkers advocate Cesar] Chavez was hailed a hero to the oppressed poor. Streets and schools all over the state of California are named after him. Children wear tee shirts with his name and image emblazoned across the front. And now, Chavez is to be forced again into the nation’s reconstructed memory through a major motion picture about his life that calls him an American hero<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Labeling Cesar Chavez an American hero is akin to labeling Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky as Russian heroes.”</span></div>

<div>—American Policy Center column, January 2014</div>

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<div>Background</div>

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<div>Tom DeWeese spends months on the lecture circuit each year, warning of an imminent danger to liberty and freedom — sustainable resource management. His principal target is Agenda 21, a set of voluntary “smart growth” principles signed by then-President George H.W. Bush and 177 other world leaders at a 1992 United Nations conference. In reality, he claims, Agenda 21 is really “international forces … turning [American] communities into little soviets.”</div>

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<div>On the surface, Agenda 21 might seem an innocuous target. It is a completely non-binding guide for dealing with overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion. But it has been a deep — and lucrative — topic for DeWeese as he rails against threats to American national sovereignty. He has used it to build a career opposing alternative fuel sources, immigrants, climate change science, environmental regulation, affordable health care and education reform, among other things.</div>

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<div>Obsessed with the impact of environmental policy on property rights and freedom, DeWeese charges that “sustainabilists” are conspiring to destroy America through creeping socialism. Ultimately, he says, the goal of Agenda 21 and the UN is to force the United States and other countries into a tyrannical, one-world government in which bicycle paths and wildlife refuges will be vastly more important than human beings. What is more, he says, our children are being used to hasten this future, through U.S. Department of Education-funded UN programs that turn them into little one-world government zombies.</div>

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<div>“It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent,” DeWeese wrote in a 2009 report. “But the devastation to our liberty and way of life is the same as if Lenin ordered it.” The plan, he adds, is a “complete agenda of control” that has been “wrapped in a green blanket, scaring us with horror stories about the destruction of the environment — and so we are now throwing our liberties on the bonfire like a good old fashioned book burning — all in the name of protecting the planet.”</div>

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<div>The effects of this fearmongering by DeWeese and like-minded conspiracy theorists have been far-reaching. Not only have some counties passed resolutions opposing Agenda 21 (along with state legislatures in Kansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Virginia), but the Republican National Committee (RNC) in January 2012 passed one as well, decrying Agenda 21 as a “destructive and insidious scheme” meant to impose “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The RNC recommended that the resolution be adopted as part of the Republican platform at its August 2012 convention (in fact, a much watered down version of the resolution became part of the GOP presidential platform). In addition, Alabama passed a law aimed at outlawing any effects of the plan, and one chamber of the legislatures in Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma have passed similar needless statutes.</span></div>

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<div>Born and raised in Newark, Ohio, DeWeese graduated from Ohio State University with a journalism degree in 1971. According to his biography, he has been the editor of two newspapers, a candidate for the Ohio legislature, and a campaign manager/field worker in a couple of congressional races. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1982, working as a fundraiser and PR man for legislative policy organizations. In 1985, he launched The DeWeese Company, a <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">direct marketing and publishing company, which today is the newsletter arm of his principal concern, the American Policy Center.</span></div>

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<div>Founded by DeWeese in 1988, the American Policy Center (APC) is a privately funded <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">501(c)(4)</span> tax-exempt nonprofit with two broad goals: to promote free enterprise and to limit government restrictions of commerce and individuals. It advocates an unregulated trickle-down approach, flogging the notion that free market checks and balances and private property ownership will create wealth, employment, goods and services, and even protect the environment.</div>

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<div>DeWeese has managed to spread his propaganda into Tea Party groups and various conspiracy theorists of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, from the John Birch Society and Texans for Accountable Government to off-the-rails media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The APC website offers a variety of anti-Agenda 21 fact sheets, petitions and handouts for citizen activists, including documents intended for presentation to local public officials.</div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeWeese works closely with the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group,</span> speaking at many of its regional meetings as an expert on Agenda 21. A DeWeese appearance at the Kansas Americans for Prosperity chapter in 2012 was described like this: “Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center, will explain the U.N.’s Agenda 21 initiative, and help you translate the vague terminology associated with Agenda 21. (Think ‘community visioning,’ ‘sustainable development,’ ‘livable communities,’ etc.).”</div>

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<div>A quick scan of DeWeese’s APC columns gives a sense of his<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> worldview, carrying such menacing headlines as “Is the U.S. Being Colonized by Red China?”; “The Alamo: Hallowed American Ground or UN Captive?”; “Sustainable Development: The Evil Facing America”; “The Growing Threat of Smart Meters”; “Sustainability Marxism”; and “Private Property Ownership is the Only Way to Eradicate Poverty.”</span></div>

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<div>In fact, just about any effort to address critical social and environmental issues facing society, particularly on a global scale, is smeared by DeWeese with the same broad brush: It represents the onset of tyranny and the loss of personal rights.</div>

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<div>In an April 2014 column entitled “The Principles of Freedom vs. Agenda 21,” he elaborated: “The basic principles of freedom are consistent with man’s nature and that’s why they work. When the principles of freedom are recognized and adhered to, there is prosperity, justice and happiness. When the principles have been ignored or rejected, men have suffered poverty, stagnation and political tyranny.”</div>

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<div>Therefore, he concludes, climate change is a lie intended to bolster environmental restrictions; immigration protects Third World environments by transferring people to our regulated society; alternative energy research tilts the U.S. into “the socialist, sustainable global noose”;<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> education reform is a “sustainabil<b>ist</b>” </span>conspiracy to indoctrinate children; and health care reform ushers in death panels staffed by faceless bureaucrats.</div>

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<div>Despite overwhelming consensus among scientists to the contrary, DeWeese claims that the idea of climate change “has been so discredited in the true scientific community that proponents have become almost silly in their continued attempts to push it.” The reason they do, he says, is that “Agenda 21 policy is built on the premise that man is destroying the Earth. Climate Change is their ‘Proof.’ To eliminate that premise is to remove all credibility and purpose for their entire agenda. They are willing to go to any length, even lies, to keep the climate change foot on our throats.”</div>

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<div>Environmentalists support immigration, DeWeese says, because “[t]hey argue that the US has a greater ability to control them [immigrants] and protect the environment than if we left them in third world countries. … That’s because the Greens have already strangled our nation and our industry with massive environmental regulations.”</div>

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<div>And he argues that the real goal of Agenda 21 is to destroy the free market system. He claims that the UN, congressional representatives, the media, and Hollywood types have issued “statement after statement” deriding the free market as evil, corrupt and a tool of the rich to hold down the poor. “Now suddenly, they are worried about the poor – if it leads to their ability to raid our bank accounts,” he adds. “So, are they really worried about protecting the environment — or honoring the tactics of Jesse James? Redistribution of wealth is behind every policy that comes out of the UN, and now the Obama Administration as well.”</div>

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<div>The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, DeWeese continues, is an “attack dog” with the goal of shutting down entire industries like coal, along with making it difficult to operate a manufacturing business in the U.S., let alone start a new one. On top of that, he says, green policies are “vigorously” blocking fracking, oil drilling, coal mining and other traditional energy acquisition methods, while wasting billions of dollars on alternative energy sources such as wind and solar.</div>

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<div>But here is his bottom line: “What is the motivation to put such shackles on the US economic engine? The excuse is that energy use drives up CO2 emissions and accelerates global warming – the excuse necessary to ‘harmonize’ the US into the socialist, sustainable global noose.”</div>

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<div>Federal educational reform programs, such as Goals 2000, School-to-Work and Outcome Based Education are thinly disguised “behavior-modification programs, according to DeWeese: “To reform a nation that has been created on the ideals of limited government, free enterprise and individual liberty into one that unquestioningly accepts government top down control — will take time,” he says. “They must wait out those of us who were educated in the old system, we who were taught that we were born with our rights and that government’s job is to protect those rights. The sustainable system says government will grant us our rights. To enforce such a radical turn around of our society requires that the children be indoctrinated to accept it.”</div>

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<div>Health care reform is yet another dangerous erosion of national sovereignty, DeWeese says. “Sustainable medicine makes decisions through visioning councils (usually bureaucrats with little or no medical knowledge) assigned the power to determine what shall be done or not done to each body in its ‘group’ in its ‘native habitat.’ Sustainable medicine experts do not refer to citizens in sovereign nations, but to ‘humans’ in their ‘settlements.’ ”</div>

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<div>Serving on the APC board of directors are Bonner Cohen, who, according to Sourcewatch, once ran “EPA Watch,” a Philip Morris-funded newsletter that accused the EPA of "everything from destroying the U.S. economy to trying to stop people from taking showers," and John Meredith, son of civil rights hero James Meredith. The center’s board of advisors includes Alan Caruba, the APC’s communications director and an adjunct policy analyst at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a similar organization. Caruba also blogs for Tea Party Nation, the only Tea Party group listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Another member of that board is Sam Rohrer, a former Pennsylvania state legislator. </div>

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<div>Don Terry</div>

<div>March 04, 2013</div>

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<div>Continuing its 50-year assault on globalism, the John Birch Society attacks a UN plan it claims will gut property rights.</div>

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<div>A few days before the John Birch Society’s December birthday luncheon in Sacramento, Calif., the influence and obsessions of the arch-conservative group were on display thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., not far from the Smithsonian Institution, where other relics of America’s past are housed.</div>

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<div>On Dec. 4, Republican senators voted down a United Nations treaty that would ban discrimination against people with <b>disabilities.</b> They did so even though Bob Dole, the ailing elder statesman, former presidential standard-bearer, former Republican majority leader and war hero, supported the measure. Dole watched the vote on the Senate floor from his wheelchair, having recently been released from the hospital. According to The New York Times, “a majority of the Republicans who voted against the treaty, which was modeled on the Americans with Disabilities Act, said they feared it would infringe on American sovereignty.’’</div>

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<div>Tom Deweese</div>

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<div>That fear has been a key talking point in the Birch Society’s attacks on the U.N. since the early 1960s, when it flooded the country with bumper stickers, placards, newspaper ads and thousands of letters to elected officials and other “opinion molders” demanding “Get US Out of the UN.”</div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Two years ago, the John Birch Society, which hails itself as an educational army, began another aggressive assault on its old enemy. It started a nationwide campaign, this time with a blitz of E-mails, lectures and DVDs, to stop the non-binding Agenda 21,</span> which was passed and signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 by more than 170 world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush. To John Birch Society leaders and others on the right, such as Tom DeWeese — a close ally and founder of the American Policy Center, which advocates limited growth — Agenda 21 is a sneak attack by the U.N. on American sovereignty and property rights.</div>

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<div>DeWeese had been conducting an almost one-man crusade against Agenda 21 for years before the John Birch Society stepped in with foot soldiers and E-mail lists and gave “a skeleton of organization to the movement,” said Arthur R. Thompson, the society’s CEO. “We’re in a fight to save our country,” he told the California banquet. “We’re in a fight to save the people who are unwilling to bend their knee to a totalitarian state.’’</div>

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<div>Since June of 2011, Hal Shurtleff, an indefatigable, 53-year-old father of five, Army veteran and regional field director for the Birch Society on the East Coast, has conducted more than 70 anti-Agenda 21 presentations, he said in an E-mail. ‘I just received two invitations to speak on the subject while writing this email,” he said. One was from a <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">TV station in Nashua, N.H.</span>, the other a community group in Hudson, Mass.</div>

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<div>Meanwhile, Birch Society chapter leaders have been doing the same thing in public libraries, rec center basements and hotel conference rooms from California to Maine. “I think our efforts have played a key role in creating effective opposition to Agenda 21 across the country,” Shurtleff said. The GOP included anti-Agenda 21 language in its party platform. <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Last May, the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature became the first to pass a state bill barring the enactment of any policy recommendations traceable to Agenda 21.</span></div>

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<div>“Organization is so important,” John McManus, the Birch Society president, told the banquet. “We don’t stress that enough. You’ve got to be organized. If we put out a memo from headquarters, it’s time to get involved in this, all of a sudden all across the country people say, ‘Okay, give me some tools, give me a DVD, give me a pamphlet, have a speaker come to my community.’ And it works. The state of Alabama has come out and said we will not have Agenda 21 in any community in the state of Alabama. Why not have that happen in other places?”</div>

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<div>John McManus</div>

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<div>The coordinated attacks have surprised and rattled city planners and environmentalists across the country. One of them said they had been “blindsided’’ and were hustling to catch up and develop strategies to counter the Birch Society and its Tea Party and other right-wing allies. The groups have been showing up at city council and planning board meetings to protest everything from the construction of bicycle paths to expanding public transportation routes to preserving open spaces. The protesters don’t see green projects. They see red plots.</div>

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<div><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We have established a good network of freedom activists who know how to identify Agenda 21 initiatives,” the Boston-based Shurtleff said. “We use Facebook, social media, and emails. There are dozens of Facebook pages dedicated to Agenda 21 as well as hundreds of Tea Party type groups.</span></div>

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<div>“Our biggest success,” he continued, “is raising visibility and making it controversial.”</div>

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