A Newsletter with an Eye on Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Networks of Paranoia

The interlocking directorates at the heart of the right's descent into
lunacy

Regular Altercation readers will have noticed by now that one of this
newsletter's hobbyhorses is the manner in which the dangerous lunacy

that currently rules the conservative movement has long been normalized
as just one side in a "both sides" political debate in which truth
(or even sanity) has no intrinsic value. I read a few MSM pieces this
past week that offer some insight as to how we arrived at this benighted
political moment.

The first is a fine investigation by Robert O'Harrow Jr.
, published by
The Washington Post Magazine
,
of the extremely secretive-and extremely influential-Council for
National Policy (CNP), a registered charity whose members currently
include Mike Pence, Ralph Reed, L. Brent Bozell III (of the misnamed
Media Research Center), and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas. The council was started back in the '80s by a group
that included Tim LaHaye, author of the far-right Judgment Day "Left
Behind" series, which would eventually sell more than 65 million
copies, and also the man who is credited with convincing Jerry Falwell
to create the Moral Majority. I've been researching LaHaye for my book
on the debate over Israel-Palestine and here is a typical statement of
his beliefs: "As long as there is an Israeli air force capable of
nuclear retaliation," LaHaye promised, "Russia will not attack the
United States. Before they can suppress the world with their
totalitarian ideology, they must first remove Israel ... Thus Israel's
strategy and military strength are our own nation's best interest for
survival."

The early group apparently also included Ed Feulner, the co-founder of
the Heritage Foundation; right-wing entrepreneur Paul Weyrich, who, on
his Wikipedia page, takes credit for having founded the Heritage
Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC); and infamous ERA foe Phyllis Schlafly. At one
of its first meetings, O'Harrow reports, Oliver North told its members
that Nicaragua and the USSR had as their "real target" the United
States, and as a result, "This country is in great, great jeopardy
from these people, who are truly godless communists." With such
speeches he was able to garner private funding for the Contras, which
eventually led to the Iran-Contra scandal in which the U.S. sold arms to
Iran at inflated prices in order to buy weapons for the Nicaraguan
Contras, in clear violation of congressional restrictions. Another
typical talk to the group informed its members that "activists on the
left and the people who fund them are out to destroy everything you hold
dear ... Your families. Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of
speech. Your freedom of religion. Everything."

According to a 2015 CNP directory to which O'Harrow was privy, the
group's members at the time included Leonard Leo, then of the
Federalist Society; Steve Bannon, then leader of Breitbart News and
later chief executive of Donald Trump's campaign; David Bossie, the
head of the group Citizens United and later Trump's deputy campaign
manager; and Kellyanne Conway, who would become a White House counselor.
CNP also launched a network of cooperative right-wing organizations
called the Conservative Action Project (CAP) in which it coordinates its
efforts with groups like the American Family Association
,
the Family Research Council
,
and Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition
.
(This is described in detail in Anne Nelson's 2019 book, Shadow
Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right
.) CAP claims a
membership of over 100 groups "representing all major elements of the
conservative movement-economic, social, and national security."

These people were primed for Trump, and he, of course, was primed for
anyone who would support him for any reason. They've been notably
active in questioning and subverting American elections. As O'Harrow
reports, "In 2017, Trump announced a Presidential Advisory Commission
on Election Integrity
,
which included two CNP members: Kenneth Blackwell, the former secretary
of state of Ohio, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal
Foundation . In August 2019, Lisa
Nelson, a CNP member and chief executive of the American Legislative
Exchange Council, launched an initiative called the "ALEC
Political Process
Working Group," according to an internal email. Among other things,
the group was going to focus on "election law and ballot integrity."
Also, regarding the January 6 insurrection, "Ginni Thomas, then a CNP
Action board member, praised rally-goers in tweets: "LOVE MAGA
people!!!!
"

Accordingly, CNP members have been at the forefront of perpetuating the
lie of a stolen election. Something called the Election Transparency
Initiative has argued that "the
integrity of our electoral system was severely compromised in 2020 when
pro-abortion Democrats-utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic as an
excuse-weakened state laws that ensure free and fair elections." CNP
members have also launched groups like the Center for Election Integrity

and the National Election Protection Initiative

to further undermine our democracy. In doing so, they are working not
only for and with Trumpists but also Pence's group, Advancing American
Freedom . Roughly half of the
40-some people on the Pence group's advisory board and its board of
directors have been CNP members or guests in recent years, according to
O'Harrow, as is Pence himself.

Keep in mind: This conspiracy-can you think of a better word for
it?-to destroy our democracy on the basis of a bunch of crazy,
paranoid, racist imaginary threats is being carried out under the
auspices of tax-deductible charity.

A second useful injection of historical perspective comes from Laura
Field's piece on the Claremont Institute in The New Republic
.
Back when people were looking for some-any-hint of intellectual
coherence in the Trump critique, they landed on an article published in
September 2016 on the institute's website. The "Flight 93 Election
"
essay argued that a Hillary Clinton victory in that year's
presidential election would effectively spell the end of civilization.
Its author, Michael Anton, would later join Trump's National Security
Council, and now works for Hillsdale College, whose president, Larry P.
Arnn, chaired President Trump's stupid 1776 Commission Report
,
which argued

for the promotion of "patriotic education." Back then, Anton wrote
that "a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a
semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your
chances." During the 2020 election, he and other Claremont denizens
were promoting the beyond lunatic threat of a "Biden coup
," while John C.
Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute's Center for
Constitutional Jurisprudence, authored a six-point plan

for Trump that spelled out how Pence could overturn the election on
January 6 (in the event that Trump-supporting rioters and terrorists did
not find him and kill him first).

A third piece that helps to shed some light on the current moment is an
article by Elisabeth Zerofsky in The New York Times Magazine
,
which, while overly indulgent to a great many specious intellectual
claims in this view, offers useful information on the current vogue
among conservative intellectuals for Viktor Orban, the man who is
destroying Hungarian democracy as he builds up his autocratic
leadership. I mentioned in a recent column

the love showered on him by Tucker Carlson and Mike Pence, among others.
Here again we hear crazy complaints like that of Rod Dreher, who
imagines that "we're at a point now where we have such cultural
disintegration in the U.S. that the choice might actually be between an
illiberal democracy of the left or an illiberal democracy of the
right." He is particularly concerned with how "incredibly
destructive" U.S. universities "have been to American society ... If
you resist, you get targeted by a multibillion-dollar industrial complex
that has the full support of the U.S. government, high and low culture,
the legal establishment, the courts, etc." Sadly, the Republican Party
"seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were
advocating about five years ago."

The piece also quotes Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen,
author of the book Why Liberalism Failed, and Adrian Vermeule, a
professor of constitutional law at Harvard, who wrote in 2018
in
American Affairs that the very logic of liberalism turned it into an
"imperialist progressive" force that could destroy conservatism
"at a moment's notice." Evidence? Same-sex marriage.

Remember, all this is coming from the right's intellectuals. The
right's politicians and the pundits are much more vulgar about their
claims. So if you were wondering how it was that a governor's race in
Virginia could turn on the horror of AP English students reading a
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a Nobel laureate (who-surprise,
surprise-just happens to be a Black woman) as in this advertisement
,
well here is at least a partial answer. (Note also that the poor,
traumatized fellow forced to read Toni Morrison's Beloved

grew up to be a lawyer at the National Republican Congressional
Committee.) Oh, and if you want to play "Where's Waldo" with the
anti-Semitic George Soros dog whistle so evident in almost all
Republican advertising these days, look no further

than this crazy claim by the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin about
"George Soros-backed allies" in "the left, liberal-progressive
movement. They've inserted political operatives into our school system
disguised as school boards."

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If I had more space, I would tell you about the tribute I attended this
past Sunday to Robert Caro at the New-York Historical Society,
celebrating its purchase of his incredibly voluminous papers. But the
people I work for here are tyrants when it comes to space (yes, even
cyberspace). And so I will have to make do with recommending a short
film about Caro

that was shown at the proceedings as well as a visit to the exhibition

to see how Caro's world-historic sausages are made. Also, whether you
can make it to NYHS, or even care about such things as historical
sausage making, invest some time in Caro's Master of the Senate
(as Barack
Obama did when he first became president). It gets my vote for the best
nonfiction book of all time.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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