The Council for National Policy was created in 1981 by the extreme white wing of the Republican Party. Mike Pence is a member of the CNP as is Ohio Representative Jim Jordan (NAZI-OH) so was the late Foster Friess who gave $500,000 to a gaggle of religionist organizations in South Dakota just before he croaked. Robert Mercer, the blow-it-all-up Cambridge Analytica guy with billions stashed in South Dakota and ties to Faceberg and Maria Butina is a major donor to CNP. Members have included Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Steve Bannon, Ginni Thomas, Betsy DeVos, Leonard Leo, current Speaker of the House Johnson and other Earth hating notables.
Anne Nelson, is a research scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, author of "Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right" and calls CNP a pluto-theocracy. She was part of a panel interviewed by WBUR's Megna Chakrabarti.
They have their media people. They have the Salem Radio Network is one of their central partners. And they basically put out their objectives and then in these closed rooms, figure out how they're going to pursue them. [Ginni] Thomas, Mrs. Clarence Thomas is a leading member. People who were involved in the January 6th protest such as Jenny Beth Martin are leading members. So to place Mike Johnson as a member of this organization is very significant. And he also comes out of the Louisiana legislature.
And then James Dobson, who was mentioned earlier and was a founding member of the Council for National Policy, anointed him as the head of something called the Family Research Council, which has a major lobbying arm for right wing fundamentalists in Washington, also has a media empire. And if you drive around the South and the Midwest, and you just turn on the car radio, you're going to run into these stations with this very one-sided programming that suggests that it's a sin to vote for a Democrat, basically.
And people should realize that Tony Perkins and the CNP members played a major role in bringing Donald Trump to office. Organizing many fundamentalists and partner organizations such as the National Rifle Association and others to canvas for him and contributing to his war chest. So one of the rewards, besides their ability to give him a list for federal judge appointments, was to allow Tony Perkins to write various social areas of the Republican platform in 2016. And lo and behold, conversion therapy for homosexuals appeared in the Republican platform, and Tony Perkins was given the credit.
So Mike Johnson has actually, at the Council for International Policy in 2019, said he was the quote, "bag man" for Tony Perkins in the past, and credited him with shaping his career. And in fact, I describe Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana as American Petro states. And growing up there, you just see how the Southern Baptist hierarchy and other leading figures in the state are woven into the oil industry. So in the founding of the Council for National Policy, you have figures like Nelson Bunker Hunt and others, but you also have the Koch brothers coming into the CNP picture in 2010. He said Morton Blackwell was responsible for his going to Congress in the first place. Morton Blackwell founded the Leadership Institute, which claims to have trained over 230,000 conservative candidates and campaign workers.
This is an engine that has been working for over 40 years and the Democrats don't have the equivalent of it. It's not a coincidence that Mike Johnson got a 2% rating from the Sierra Club for his voting record. [excerpt, Anne Nelson, WBUR]Learn more about how christian nationalism distorts biblical history.
No comments:
Post a Comment