Introduction: Recent decades have seen the growth of the Christian Right, a major force within the Republican Party and on the American political landscape itself. The Family, a recent book by Jeff Sharlet has gained considerable traction and sets forth the profound influence wielded within U.S. power structure by an organization called The Family, founded in the 1930’s by a Norwegian immigrant named Abram Vereide (usually referred to by those familiar with him as “Abram.”) Although its primary influence is within the GOP, the Family has considerable gravitas within the Democratic Party as well.
This program highlights the organization’s profound relationship with the Underground Reich and the Bormann capital network. Vereide and his associates played a significant role in neutralizing the de- Nazification of Germany and the political rehabilitation of Third Reich alumni for service both in the “New” Federal Republic of Germany and U.S. intelligence. (Vereide is pictured below and at right with then President Eisenhower in 1960.)
Thus: “Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar era–the National Association of Evangelicals, Campus Crusade, the Billy Graham Crusade, Youth For Christ, the Navigators, and many more–one finds the unexplained presence of men such as [Nazi agent Manfred] Zapp, adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be.”
After delineating the pre-war and wartime careers in the United States of Nazi spies Manfred Zapp (pictured above and at left) and Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the program notes that they were among those who became close associates of “Abram” in his “saving” of Third Reich alumni for duty in the Cold War. They were typical and by no means the worst of the Nazis recruited by Vereide and his associates.
Program Highlights Include: Vereide’s “saving” of Hermann J. Abs (right), “HItler’s Banker” so that he might become “Adenauer’s Banker”. Vereide’s role in saving manufacturing plants of top Nazis from seizure by the Allies; Vereide and his associates’ successful efforts at aiding the rearming of Germany for the Cold War; Vereide’s successful attempt to lift travel restrictions on “former” Gestapo officer von Gienanth; projections by anti-fascists during the war that the Third Reich’s plans to survive military defeat would involve networking with reactionary U.S. fundamentalists; Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen’s “post-intelligence” career as a religious evangelist.
1. We begin by examining the background of Manfred Zapp, a Nazi spy who became a close evangelical associate of Abram Vereide and the Family.
Manfred Zapp, a native of Dusseldorf by way of Pretoria, merited a line in the news when he stepped from an ocean liner onto the docks of New York City on September 22, 1938, a warm windy day at the edge of a South Atlantic hurricane. Just a few words in the New York Times’ “Ocean Travelers” column, a list of the travelers of note buried in the back of the paper. By the time he left the United States, his departure would win headlines. . . .
2. Zapp ran the Transocean News Agency, a Nazi espionage and propaganda outfit disguised as a journalistic operation.
. . . Zapp had been given charge of the American offices of the Transocean News Agency, ostensibly the creation of a group of unnamed German financiers. He had recently left a similar post in South Africa. “It is of paramount importance,” the German charge d’affaires in Washington had written Zapp the month before his arrival, “that a crossing of wires with the work of the D.N.B.–Deutschland News Bureau–“be absolutely avoided.” DNN was transparently the tool of the Nazi regime and thus under constant scrutiny. Transocean, as an allegedly independent agency, might operate more freely. “My task here in America is so big and so difficult,” Zapp wrote the German ambassador to South Africa a month after he arrived, “that it demands all my energies.”
3. Note that Zapp’s activities in the U.S. involved networking with members of the New York elite whom he believed (in many cases correctly) to be sympathetic to fascism. Like many Nazi and fascist sympathizers, Zapp disdained many of the superficial trappings of fascism, while valuing the corporatist philosophy at the foundation of the system.
What was Zapp’s task? During his American tenure, he flitted in black tie and tails from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue enjoying the hospitality of rich men and beautiful women–the gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote of Zapp’s “madcap girlfriend,” a big-spending society girl who seemed to consume at least as much of Zapp’s attention as the news. He avoided as much as he could discussions of what he considered the tedium of politics. His friends knew he had dined with Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and Roosevelt himself, and some must also have known that he had worked quietly–and illegally, if one must be technical–against the president’s reelection. But one did not ask questions. He traveled, though no one was quite sure where he went off to. One moment he was hovering over the teletype in Manhattan; the next he was to be found in Havana, on the occasion of a meeting of foreign ministers. Some might have called him a Nazi agent, there to encourage Cuba’s inclinations–a popular radio program, transmitted across the Caribbean, was called The Nazi Hour–but Zapp could truthfully reply that he rarely stirred from the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, where he sat sipping cocktails, happy to buy drinks for any man–or, preferably, lady–who cared to chat with him. . . .
4. More about Zapp’s networking with elements of the American elite who harbored fascist sympathies.
. . . . To Zapp, totalitarianism–the term he preferred to fascism–was, once pruned of its absurdities, a sensible and lovely idea. The torches and the “long knives,” the death’s-head and all that red-faced singing and table pounding, these activities Zapp did not care for. He actually preferred life in America, the canyons of Manhattan and the gin-lit balconies of the city’s best people, conversations that did not begin with “Heil Hitler!” Zapp signed his letters with this invocation, and a portrait of the Fuhrer hung in his office, but Zapp the journalist was too sensitive a recording device to enjoy all that arm snapping. If only Manhattan and Munich, Washington and Berlin, could be merged. It was a matter not of warfare but of harmony, democracy’s bickering and bile giving way to the “new conception,” in which power and will would be one.
5. Eventually, Zapp’s espionage activities caused him to fall afoul of the U.S. authorities.
Within a year, however, Zapp found cause to resist returning to that fine new system. After a series of unsolved murders and perplexing explosions and intercepted transmissions led the FBI to raid his front organizations in Boston, Baltimore, Buffalo, Denver, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Zapp’s spartan office off Fifth Avenue, where they found what they believed to be evidence of the orchestration of it all, Zapp began to reconsider his enthusiasm for Hitler’s new order. He had failed the Fuhrer. How would his will judge him? What power would be exerted in the Gestapo “beating rooms” that Transocean employees had once considered themselves privileged to tour?
The FBI seized him and his chief deputy and whisked them away to cold, bare rooms, on Ellis Island, no less, where not long before, the rabble of Europe had been processed into “mongrel” America, land of “degenerate democracy,” as Roosevelt himself quoted Zapp in a speech denouncing Germany’s “strategy of terror.” . . .
6. Another of the Nazi agents with whom Abram Vereide and the Family would network after the war was Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the Gestapo chief of the German embassy in Washington and a member of the SS.
. . . . On the other were men such as Zapp. Along with a D.C.-based diplomat named Ulrich von Gienanth (whom he would rejoin after the war in Abram’s prayer meetings), Zapp considered the coming conflict between the United States and the Reich one to be resolved through quiet conversation, between German gentlemen and American “industrialists and State Department men.”
Von Gienanth, a muscular, sandy-haired man whose dull expression disguised a chilly intelligence, “seems to be a very agreeable fellow,” Zapp wrote his brother, who had studied in Munich with the baron-to-be. Only second secretary in the embassy, von Gienanth maintained a frightening grip over his fellow diplomats. He was an undercover SS man, the ears and eyes of the “Reichsministry of Proper Enlightenment and Propaganda,” charged with keeping watch over its secret American operations. He was, in short, the Gestapo chief in America. While Zapp worried about his legal prospects in the Indian Summer of 1940, von Gienanth was likely waiting for news of a major operation in New Jersey: the detonation of the Hercules gunpowder plant, an explosion that on September 12 killed forty-seven and sent shockwaves so strong that they snapped wind into the sails of boaters in far-off Long Island Sound. . . .
. . . . Von Gienanth’s initiatives were whimsical by comparison. Once for instance, he paid a pilot to dump pro-Nazi antiwar fliers on the White House lawn. He devoted himself to changing Goebbels’ gold into dollars, and those dollars into laundered “donations” to the America First Committee, where unwitting isolationists–Abram allies such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg and America First President Robert M. Hanes among them–stumped for recognition of the “fact” on Hitler’s inevitability.
Like Zapp, von Gienanth considered himself a commonsense man.
And Zapp–Zapp simply reported the news and sold it on the wire. Or gave it away. To the papers of Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and to the small-town editors of America’s gullible heartland, Zapp offered Transocean reports for almost nothing. In some South American countries, 30 percent or more of foreign news–the enthusiastic welcome given conquering German forces, the Jewish cabal in Washington, the moral rot of the American people–was produced by or channeled through Zapp’s offices. On the side, he compiled a report on Soviet-inspired “Polish atrocities” against the long-suffering German people and distributed it to thousands of leading Americans, the sort sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted Christian. Zapp’s sympathetic nature would prove, after the war, to be as genuine as his distorted sense of history’s victims. . . .
7. Next, the broadcast sets forth Abram [Vereide] and the Family’s positioning as a vehicle for the recruitment of Nazis to serve both the U.S. and the “New” Federal Republic of Germany. The organization involved in this served as a principal moral compass for much of the American power elite during the Cold War and through the present. The organizations which rescued and rehabilitated Third Reich alumni are at the foundation of the contemporary evangelical establishment.
. . . Establishment Cold Warriors of [Marshall Plan administrator Donald C.] Stone’s ilk dominate the history books. Zapp, the ally with an ugly past, is his dark shadow. But Abram and the influence of his fellow fundamentalists would remain invisible for decades, their influence unmarked by media and academic establishments. The role played by fundamentalists in refashioning the world’s greatest fascist power into a democracy would go unnoticed. So, too, would the role of fascism–or, rather, that of fascism’s ghost–in shaping the newly internationalist ambition of evangelical conservatives in the postwar era.
Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar era–the National Association of Evangelicals, Campus Crusade, the Billy Graham Crusade, Youth For Christ, the Navigators, and many more–one finds the unexplained presence of men such as Zapp, adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be. From American Christendom, Zapp and his ilk took the cloak of redemption, cheap grace, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of their most famous victims. To it, they offered something harder to define. This is an investigation of that transmission; the last message from the Ministry of Proper Enlightenment; the story of American fundamentalism’s German connection. . . .
8. When Abram got around to “saving” Third Reich alumni for service to the “New Germany,” as well as U.S. intelligence, he selected some genuinely ripe individuals.
Gedat was among the least tainted of the men that Abram and Fricke, and later Gedat himself, gathered into prayer cells to help forge the new West German state. But they were repentant men, this they testified to at every session. Repentant for what? It was hard to say. Every one of them claimed to have suffered during the war years. Men such as Hermann J. Abs, “Hitler’s banker” and a vice president of Abram’s International Christian Leadership (ICL), German division; Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, the hypernationalist ideologue whose conflation of Germany with Christianity, and most of Europe with Germany, had inspired the Nazis to understand their war-hunger as divine; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Fuhrer in 1940, insisted that he had never believed Hitler, had been forced into his arms by the Red Menace, had regretted the unfortunate alliance with such a vulgar fool, a disgrace to God’s true plan for Germany. They had done nothing wrong; they, too, if one gave it some though, were victims.
Perhaps some of them were. That is one of the many clever strategies of fascism: persecution belongs to the powerful, according to its rules, both to dole out and to claim as the honor due martyrs. Abram did not ask questions; he simply took out his washcloth and got busy with the blood of the lamb. He scrubbed his “new men” clean. Did it work? Abs, “Hitler’s banker,” became “Adenauer’s banker,” a key figure in the West German government’s financial resurrection. Schmelz kept his factory. Rohrbach wrote on, authoring tributes to Abram’s International Christian Leadership in the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
And Speidel? He was a special case, a co conspirator with Rommel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944. There was something almost American about him; like Buchman, like Barton, he considered Hitler’s racial policies a distraction from his really good ideas. For this ambivalence, the Allies rewarded him: he served as commander in chief of NATO ground forces from 1957 to 1963, when Charles de Gaulle, unpersuaded of his reconstruction, insisted on his ouster.
Such men are only a few of those whom Abram helped, and by no means the worst. There were Zapp and von Gienanth, there were “little Nazis” Abram championed for U.S. intelligence positions, and there were big ones: Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps, among them. For those beyond hope of blank-slate reinvention, Abram and his web of Christian cells led medical mercy (von Neurath, sentenced to fifteen years for crimes against humanity, was released early in 1953; Abram took up his case up his case upon learning from von Neurath’s daughter that her father, classified as a “major War Criminal,” was receiving less than exemplary dental care in prison) or expediency(it was unjust, they felt, that Pohl, who while imprisoned by the Allies wrote a memoir called Credo: My Way to God–a Christ-besotted path that did not include acknowledging his role in mass murder–should be left wondering when he would be hanged.)
When occupation forces charged Abs with war crimes, he offered a novel defense. He did not deny what he had done for Hitler; he simply declared that he had done it for money, fascism be damned. He would gladly do as much for the Allies. And so he did, a task at which he so excelled that he would come to be known as the wizard of the “German Miracle.” His past was forgotten–a phrase that must be written in passive voice in order to suggest the gentle elision of history in the postwar years, undertakenby those eager to see a conservative German state rise from the ashes, a sober son of Hitler’s fatherland that would inherit the old man’s hatred for one radicalism but not his love of another. . . .
9. Senator Alexander Wiley (R‑Wisconsin) was another close associate of Abram’s. Wiley was instrumental in the successfully lobbying (along with Abram and his aide Otto Fricke) for the rearming of the German army against the former Soviet Union.
. . . . Senator Wiley wanted total war. Take the men of Hitler’s old panzer divisions, bless ’em under Christ, and point ’em toward Moscow. Abram’s German point man, Otto Fricke, wasn’t so blood-thirsty; he merely wanted twenty-five rearmed German divisions to slow the Russian invasion he saw coming. “What Do We Christians Think of Re-Armament?” was the theme of one of Fricke’s cell meetings in 1950. They were conflicted, tempted to take “malicious joy that the ‘Allies’ are now forced to empty with spoons the bitter soup that has been served by the Russians.” The judgments at Nuremberg had dishonored the Wermacht, and the dismantling had insulted and robbed Germany’s great industrialists, Krupp and Weizacker and Bosch–all well represented in Fricke’s cells. By all rights they should stand down, refuse to rearm, let the Americans defend Christendom from the Slavs. But there it was: Christendom. They were Christian men, chosen not by a nation but by Jesus himself to lead their people into the “Order” God revealed to them in their prayers. “To accomplish these tasks,” the Frankfurt cell concluded, “the state needs power and this powerfulness is indispensable for the sake of love.” . . .
10. Vereide and the Family were successful in obtaining permission for former SS/Gestapo officer von Gienanth to travel outside of Germany.
. . . . Von Gienanth was bound to the Fatherland. This, he complained to Abram, was an impediment to reconstruction. He’d wanted to attend a conference in Atlantic City with further ideas of expansion in mind. Would the American military really say that a man of his stature would blemish the boardwalk? He was on a list of undesirables, he had learned from certain connections–probably ICL men within the occupation. This would be “undesirable,” he thought, if he had been a communist. “But I don’t see any sense in including people of my attitude”–ex-fascists ready to make common cause with the United States.
Among the many testimonies von Gienanth collected on his own behalf was a letter from an American diplomat’s wife who insisted the baron had not been a Nazi so much as an “idealist.” Eventually, von Gienanth had believed, “the good and conservative element of the German people would gain control.” Fascism had been like strong medicine, unpleasant but necessary to what von Gienanth had always believed would be the reestablishment of rule by elites like himself. “In the coming years of reconstruction,” his advocate wrote, “such men will be needed who can be trusted.”
Abram contacted the Combined Travel Board that decided on which former Nazis could be allowed to leave the country. The baron was needed , Abram insisted. There were high Christian councils to be held in The Hague. “Expedite the necessary permit.”
Should that argument prove inadequate, Abram hired von Gienanth’s wife, Karein, as a hostess on call for Americans traveling on Christian missions. She was an American citizen, though she’d spent the war with her SS officer husband. Now her American passport was being threatened. Abram saved it. That summer, he sent the baron and his wife a gift of sort: a congressman from California, to be a guest on the baron’s estate. The following winter Senator Frank Carlson visited. “As you know,” Abram advised Karein, “he is one of the closest friends and advisers to Eisenhower.”
A “serene confidence has filled me,” she replied, “as to President Eisenhower’s guidance by God.” That summer, her husband flew with her to England, his passport evidently restored.
11. Next, the program notes a function convened at the castle of the Teutonic Order (Teutonic Knights) in Bavaria. (For more about the history of the Teutonic Knights, see Paul Winkler’s The Thousand-Year Conspiracy, available for download for free on this website.) Note that major players from the German power elite, business partners with their cartel associates in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, as well as key political figures, were lectured to by Christian fundamentalist “converts”–“some of the best minds of the old regime.”
The assembled received “a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon.”
. . . . The first meeting at Castle Mainau had taken place in 1949, the same year the Allies allowed Germans to begin governing themselves again. The 1951 meeting was planned to mark what Abram considered the complete moral rehabilitation–in just two years–of Germany. Abram wanted the Americans to go to them, a grand contingent of senators and representatives.
. . . . General Speidel was there, as was Rohrbach, the propagandist: There were representatives from the major German banks and from Krupp and Bosch, and there was the president of Standard Oil’s German division. There was at least one German cabinet member, parliamentarians, mayors, a dozen or more judges. A U‑boat commander, famed for torpedoing ships off the coast of Virginia, cut a dashing figure. A gaggle of aristocrats, minor princes and princesses, barons and counts and margraves were intimidated by some of the best minds of the old regime. There was the financial genius Hermann J. Abs, and a fascist editor who hd once been a comrade of the radical theorist Walter Benjamin before throwing his lot in with the Nazis.
Wallace Haines spoke for Abram. He stayed up all night before his lecture, praying for the spirit that spoke aloud to his mentor. The Americans, God told him to say, were thrilled with the “eagerness” of the Germans to forget the war. The Americans came to the Germans humbled, he told them. Haines brought proof of their new-found wisdom: a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon. . . .
12. Eventually, Vereide, the Family and their Nazi and fascist associates (on both sides of the Atlantic) were successful in getting the rigorous de-Nazification program rescinded. Note the reference to the “Morgenthau boys.” This is a reference to former Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau, who favored a rigorous approach to de-Nazification that included the de-industrialization of Germany. For more about this topic, see FTR #578, as well as All Honorable Men, available for download for free on this website.
Of particular significance is the fact that Vereide was able to intercede on behalf of industrial plants to prevent their de-Nazification.In this regard, Vereide was doing the work not of the Lord, but of the Bormann capital network.
. . . . For years, Manfred Zapp had been Abram’s harshest correspondent, constantly warning that the “man on the street” with whom he seemed to spend a great deal of time had had enough of America’s empty promises. America had committed “mental cruelty,” he charged, holding “so-called war criminals” in red coats–the uniforms of the Landsberg Prison–awaiting execution indefinitely.
Abram agreed, and sent to the occupation government letters signed by dozens of congressmen demanding action.
America prevented German industry from feeding the nation, Zapp argued.
Abram agreed, and intervened time and again on behalf of German factories. He saved as many as he could, though a steel foundry named for Hermann Goering was beyond even his powers of redemption.
America had put leftists and trade unionists and Bolsheviks in power, Zapp complained.
Abram agreed. The cleansing of the American occupation government became an obsession, the subject of his meetings with the American high commissioner John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer meetings with congressmen.
“Idealists” were prevented from serving their people, said Zapp. The man on the street was losing faith in the American religion. “Freedom in their interpretation is the ideal for which we shall fight and die but the reality is nothing else but a beautiful word for services for Western powers . . . The word freedom is not taken seriously anymore.”
Within a few years, nobody cared. The “Morgenthau Boys” were as much a part of the past as the history no German cared to speak of. . . .
13. Published before the 1944 Normandy invasion, Curt Riess’ The Nazis Go Underground forecast that the Third Reich’s strategy for going underground would involve liaison with American Protestant fundamentalists.
Also of interest to Berlin—particularly in view of the coming underground fight of the Nazis—must be the Fundamentalist Protestants, who have a considerable following in Michigan, Kansas, Colorado, and Minnesota. To be sure, some of the Fundamentalists are among the most courageous fighters for democracy, but a great many of them are definitely pro-Hitler. Their reason for this stand is that Fundamentalists do not believe in freedom of religion, and they do believe that the Jews should be punished because they killed Christ. They say that Hitler has been sent by God to ‘save Christianity and destroy atheistic Communism.’ To many of them Japan is the ‘oriental outpost of Christianity’ destined to save Asia from the danger of a ‘Communistic China.’
14. In the context of this discussion, it should be recalled that Nazi spy chief Reinhard Gehlen became an evangelist after his formal retirement from being the head of the German intelligence service. [Chief of Hitler’s intelligence apparatus for the Eastern front in World War II, Gehlen jumped to the CIA with his entire organization which became: the CIA’s department of Russian and Eastern European affairs, the de-facto NATO intelligence organization and finally the BND, the intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany.]
In this context, it should be remembered that Gehlen reported to Bormann’s security chief, Heinrich Muller and that he was clearing his postwar actions taken in conjunction with US intelligence with Admiral von Doenitz (Hitler’s nominal successor as head of state) and General Franz Halder, his former chief-of-staff. In his operations, Gehlen was operating as part of the Underground Reich.
Today, on the threshold of three score years and ten, General Reinhard Gehlen has found a surprising new field of activities. He has become an evangelist. With still unimpaired energy he has taken over the direction of a campaign for building new churches and schools for the Evangelical Church in Catholic Bavaria. After a life of seclusion he frequently attends meetings all over the province at which appeals for new funds are launched; on occasion he does not disdain to visit members of his religious community in order to encourage the enterprise and to pass the begging bowl. . .
Gehlen: Spy of the Century; by E.H. Cookridge; 1973 [SC] Pyramid Books; Copyright 1971 by European Copyright Company Limited; ISBN 0–515-03154–2; p. 450.
This piece by Ed Kilgore uses a great term for the theocrats masquerading as “Constitutional Conservatives”: “Con-Cons”:
Part of what makes the courtship and fostering of the Con-Con strain of politics so fascinating is that it clearly involves plutocrats that aren’t, themselves, theocrats but are more than willing to get into under the theocratic sheets if it suits them and are also running empires seemingly bent on bringing about environmental, financial, and socioeconomic apocalypses. So you have to wonder how much the various pseudo-theo-power-broker plutocrats are wondering about what it will take to keep the lunacy under wraps after their theocracy takes control. Take the Koch brothers. Surely they realize that, should the theocratic plutocrats ever successfully lead a “grass roots” “small government” revolt that turns society into a Handmaid’s Tale, the Koch brothers are one of the default targets for the next revolution after the Con-Con agenda trashes society. What on earth is going stop the “base” from revolting against the new theo-plutocrats? It’s not like there isn’t plenty of ‘torches and pitchforks’ sentiment amongst the Con-Con base directed towards the GOP elites too.
Televengalist linked to Muslim Brotherhood fronts-
According to files compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the founder of the world’s largest Christian television network financed his endeavor with the assistance of numerous international criminal organizations.
Documents obtained by MuckRock show that the FBI was investigating Trinity Broadcasting Network and its founder, Paul Crouch, for being in communication with the infamous Bronx mafia figure, Vincent Gigante, with regards to a “narcotics transfer of funds,” which is how the FBI classifies money-laundering.
In another document, Crouch is listed alongside Reverend Earl Paulk and Oral Roberts as “anti-Semitic white supremacists [who] were supposedly receiving funds from the [Palestinian Liberation Organization] to ‘run guns’” via an “Islamic Education Center” in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of these investigations were tagged as relating to “financial flow” involving narcotics.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/27/fbi-files-link-christian-tvs-paul-crouch-to-italian-mob-palestinian-gun-trafficking/
Dear Sir,
I would like to know if the above mentioned pic, showing Manfred Zapp, was taken from Jeff Sharlet’s book. I’m investigating Zapps carrier in South Africa and I did not find any pics there.
Thanks so much for your attention.
Regards, Michael
Here’s a great overview of how the Military Industrial Complex found God. Or, rather, how the same folks that brought us fun stuff like the Military Industrial Complex redefined God in their own image:
Well, it sounds like the Military Industrial Complex isn’t the only thing Eisenhower should have warned us about, although he may have genuinely believed that “should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,...you would not hear of that party again in our political history,” so maybe the modern day GOP and its ongoing attempt to eliminate the New Deal is something he just couldn’t imagine. After all, who could imagine that a movement of corporatist Christian ministers that apparently “encouraged ministers to preach sermons on its themes in competitions for cash prizes” would actually succeed in transforming society?!
Then again, given the scope of this “Christian libertarian” movement in the ’50s and the fact that the very same groups behind the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about were also financing sort of horrible Christian/Mammon hybrid, perhaps the threat of this movement should have been clear even back then. 17,000 “minister representatives” is one hell of a “Complex” too:
Yep:
So that was a horribly review of a particularly important chapter of 20th century history that raises number of questions. But it’s especially depressing since the most significant question raises by this is what’s changed?
Well, the corporatists are just as awful as before but decades of the mainstreaming of this stuff has apparently given their political puppets license to not even bother hiding their theocratic madness. So that’s changed.
Here’s a story that’s disturbing on the surface and far more disturbing when you factor in the propensity of right-wing politicians to employ projection as a rhetorical tool: President Trump and a closed-door meeting with a number of evangelical leaders recently, during which he framed the 2018 midterms as “a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.” He then predicted that if the “GOP loses” the midterms, the Democrats will “violently” reverse all the gains he’s made for the conservative evangelical movement, say, “they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people.”
Trump also fixated on his claim that he got “rid of” the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law forbidding churches and charitable organizations from endorsing political candidates. Except he didn’t actually get rid of that law because only Congress can do that. Trump did sign an executive order that instructs the Treasury Department not to “take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization on the basis that such individual or organization speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective, where speech of similar character has, consistent with law, not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate for public office.” But as the article points out, this executive order changed nothing. Religious organizations can express their religious views, as they always could — but still cannot formally participate in political campaigns.
But even if religious organizations do decide to formally participate in political campaigns, there’s basically been no enforcement of the Johnson Amendment under Democratic or Republican administrations and evangelical churches have been openly violating it since 2008 with no punishment from the IRS. So we have Trump bragging about a ‘gain’ he granted to evangelicals that he didn’t actually grant about a law that’s not really enforced, while warning that if the Democrats win in the midterms that they will “violently” reverse these alleged gains:
“But Trump cited this alleged accomplishment as one in a series of gains he has made for his conservative Christian supporters, as he warned, “You’re one election away from losing everything that you’ve got,” and said their opponents were “violent people” who would overturn these gains “violently.””
A warning that all the ‘gains’ for evangelicals will be violently swept away by the Democrats. It’s unclear why exactly Democrats in control of the House would use violence to reverse Trump’s policies, but he said it anyway, with a reference to Antifa. This is how Trump is dealing with the prospect of a bruising midterm:
And, of course, Trump’s self-adulation about how he got rid of the Johnson Amendment was delusional since the president doesn’t actually have the power to repeal a law:
Trump did sign an executive order that purportedly weakened federal enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, but the order did almost nothing. It didn’t suddenly allow religious organizations to directly participate in campaigns. And while weakening enforcement of the law might be seen as effectively getting rid of it, it’s not like the law is almost ever actually enforced:
And notice how evangelical churches have been openly and deliberately violating the Johnson Amendment since 2008, with no IRS punishment:
Also note that we Trump specifically calls out to Robert Jeffress, one of his spiritual advisors, and touts how Jeffress told him he was “the greatest leader for Christianity”, this is one of those instances where he may not have been making stuff up. Recall how Jeffress is one of the promoters of the “Cyrus” meme that says Trump is like the Biblical figure Cyrus who wasn’t a Christian but was still divinely led by God, thus allowing Trump to act as un-Christian as possible while still being elevated to ‘vessel of God’s work’ status by Christian leaders. That’s presumably what Trump was referring to here:
“I had the great Robert Jeffress back there. Hello, Robert. Who said about me: He may not be the perfect human being, but he is the greatest leader for Christianity,” Trump said to applause and laughter. Yep, referring to himself as the greatest leader for Christianity got applause from this audience.
So that’s how Trump’s close-door meeting with this audience of evangelical leaders went.
When Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy on the US Supreme Court it was pretty clear that abortion opponents in the US were going to be making a renewed push to get a legal case before the Supreme Court that could overturn Roe vs Wade and return the question of legal status of abortion in America to the state-level. So it should come as no surprise that a number of states just passed some of the most restricted abortion laws ever following Roe v Wade. Georgia’s governor signed into law a bill that could make the women who receive abortions after six weeks subject to life in prison or even the death penalty. Alabama’s legislature followed with the passage of a bill that would ban abortions after six weeks with no exceptions in cases of rape and incest and would punish doctors who perform abortions with up to 99 year prison sentences. Given that a large number of pregnant women have no idea they are pregnant at six weeks, especially if it was an unplanned pregnancy, the bills would effectively immediately ban abortion in those states if Roe v Wade ends up getting overturned. And Alabama and Georgia are just two of the numerous states that either passed or attempted to pass similar laws in 2019.
So it seems like a pretty good bet that abortion rights is going to be a major issue in the upcoming 2020 US election cycle. After all, when President Trump was a candidate in 2016 in infamously advocated for punishing doctors who perform abortions and the women who received them during an interview when he said “some form of punishment” must exist for the women if abortion is outlawed. This led to such an outcry that the Trump campaign walked back his comments the next day and said only the doctors should be punished. The question of who would be punished and how severe those punishments would be have long been an open question that the abortion opponents have strategically avoided for decades. But it’s going to be a lot harder for Trump and the Republicans to argue that the looming overturning of Roe v Wade isn’t going to result in doctors and women going to prison now.
But while it’s more or less guaranteed that future of abortion rights and the composition of the Supreme Court will play a significant role in the US 2020 presidential election, it’s not at all clear that broader issue of the profound and growing influence of religious extremists (the ‘American Taliban’ like Opus Dei) within the Trump administration will be a major issue. Which is too bad because it’s hard to come up with a topic more illustrative of how power is corruptly held and wielded in the modern world and morality is systematically turned on its head than the study of the connections between American religious fundamentalism, politics, and big money.
So, along those lines, it’s worth noting that the same forces financing the fusion of far right politics and religion are doing the same thing in Europe. Those were the findings of a recent study by openDemocracy that conducted the first even analysis of the financial flows from US Christian fundamental organizations into a Europe over the last decade. What they found was an explosion of spending over the last five years, along with extensive coordination with Europe’s far right parties. There’s also quite a bit of coordination with Steve Bannon’s ongoing efforts to promote the far right in Europe. It underscores the key point that the assault on abortion rights in the United States should be viewed in the context of a much larger far right assault designed to return the West to a time with religious fundamentalism and far right power politics jointly reigned supreme:
““It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.””
Yep, the rise of the European religious far right isn’t a new trend. But the pace and scale of that rise does appear to have been underappreciated, due in part to a lack of awareness of how much money was flowing from the US into these European far right religious organizations. A lack of awareness that the dark money laws in the US strongly promote. And according to openDemocracy’s new analysis, the first of its kind, US Christian organizations have significantly increased their spending in Europe over the past five years. This includes activities like financing lobbyist in Brussels for financing ‘grass roots’ anti-abortion campaigns. And also just supporting the European far right, which is viewed by these US organizations as a traditionalist ally:
Five of the groups analyzed by openDemocracy have previously been listed as partners of the US-based World Congress of Families (WCF) network, which appears to be one of the key organizations for facilitating this trans-Atlantic far right religious organizing. WCF had a summit in Verona, Italy back in March attended by far right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini. Note that Verona recently decided to use public fund to finance anti-abortion groups and has become a focal point for Italian far right politics. Also recall how Matteo Salvini has been working closely with Steve Bannon to create a pan-European far right umbrella party. So in many respects Verona was the perfect location for a WCF conference:
And note how the WCF is so extreme it calls for the criminalization of homosexuality, earning the group a ‘hate group’ label by the SPLC:
The WCF itself is a project of the International Organization for the Family and the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. In addition to the Howard Center having a director with ties to the far right Spanish Vox party, the Howard Center also has a Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev. Note that Malofeev is close to the White Russian emigre community and has close ties to the Romanov family and is an advocate a returning the monarchy to Russia so he’s a good fit for this kind of international fascist network:
But the World Congress of Families is only one of the vehicles for this trans-Atlantic far right financial flow. Alliance Defending Freedom was co-founded by Alan Sears, a man who supported a 2016 law in Belize making gay sex punishable with jail time. Alliance Defending Freedom is heavily funded by Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss and her brother Erik Prince. Keep in mind Erik Prince’s extensive ties to the governments of UAE, Saudi Arabia, and China. So it’s organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom that are the beneficiaries of the wealth Prince has obtained from selling mercenary services to these governments:
Then there’s the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which was started by Pat Robertson and has Jay Sekulow as its current chief counsel. Sekulow was one of the key laywers on Trump’s legal team:
One of the biggest spenders in Europe is The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Note that Frankin Graham is such a big Trump booster that he literally wouldn’t acknowledge that Trump has ever told a lie during an interview a few months ago, highlighting how deeply political his organization fundamentally is:
And then there’s the array of smaller US-based far right religious organizations that are also operating in Europe, like the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty which has received donations from the Koch brothers and is collaborating with Steve Bannon’s ongoing plans to train far right individuals to infiltrate the Catholic Church:
Recall that the Acton Institute, which is closely tied to Erik Prince and Betsy DeVoss, called for the return of child labor laws in 2017. Yep, anti-abortion and pro-child labor.
There’s also the US branch of the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) movement that’s been supporting Poland’s far right politicians:
Recall how Tradition, Family and Property advocates for the return of nobility as the official ruling class of society. So this group would probably find a lot in common with Konstantin Malofeev.
Finally, as the openDemocracy report notes, their analysis is likely underestimating the levels of financial flows and other resources from the US into Europe over the past decade. Plus, unlike the non-profit groups analyzed by openDemocracy, religious organizations registered as churches don’t need to file any disclosures about their foreign spending:
And that’s just a peek into the extensive money and human resources being pour into Europe’s far right by the same network of far right Christian organizations that have risen to the heights of political power in the United States. So given that the consolidation of political power by the forces behind this anti-abortion drive is likely going to be a significant issue in the US 2020 elections, the fact that these same forces are financing Europe’s far right and advocate for things like child labor and a return of the monarchy and nobility gives us an idea of implications of allowing them to consolidate power even further.
And in other terrifying US fundamentalist foreign influence news...
Here’s a story that would be disturbing in any context but it particularly disturbing in the context of President Trump’s recent barely-cloaked threats of a civil war waged on his behalf by conservative Christian evangelicals if he’s impeached and removed from office: Attorney General Bill Barr just gave a speech at Notre Dame where he not only maliciously and speciously blames secularism for a broad range of social problems, but he also characterizes this as part of some sort of elaborate secular conspiracy against Christian conservatives. As Barr put it, “This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values.” Organized destruction of society by secularists who have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia (classic anti-Semitic memes) in an unrelenting assault on religion. That’s what the Attorney General of the United States just proclaimed and this is, again, in the context of a president who is actively courting right-wing evangelicals for a civil war if he’s impeached and removed from office.
Also recall that this kind of speech is classic Bill Barr. Barr, who appears to be a member of Opus Dei, penned an essay in 1995 where he argued that expressed an extreme view that the US government should not be secular, but instead should impose “a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that… flows from God’s eternal law.”
So Bill Barr’s recent speech where he told the audience about a vast secular conspiracy against faith in America was really just reminder that if Trump does end up trying to spark a civil war over his looming impeachment, his Attorney General is going to be more than happy to frame it as a holy war. A holy war fought over Trump, which is demented even by the standards of holy wars but this is where we are:
“In a speech at University of Notre Dame’s law school Friday, Barr blamed “secularists” and “so-called progressives” for wreaking havoc on American society. Barr’s depiction of a war between the non-religious and people of faith shocked legal experts, who saw Barr’s defense of religious freedom as an assault on the First Amendment’s protection against the government’s establishment of any religion. ”
A depiction of war between the non-religious and people of faith. That was the thrust of Barr’s speech. A speech where he not only blamed a dizzying array of social ills on secularism, but presented that is part of a grand secular conspiracy. It’s “organized destruction” waged by a secular America. And highlighting how Barr continues to view the separation of church and state as part of this grand secular conspiracy against religions, he charged that Americas public schools are “ground zero” for this conspiracy against religion...presumably because force prayer is no longer allowed and schools have to teach kids about topics like evolution. He really does want to see the collapse of the separation of church and state. It’s not a secret:
Is Barr’s desire to see the collapse of the separation of church and state strong enough for him to support burning the state to the ground in a civil war? We’ll find out, but he doesn’t appear to have any qualms about using his office to promote exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories about a vast secular conspiracy against religion that are required to stoke a civil conflict.
Also keep in mind if that the ‘UkraineGate’ scandal is what ends up leading to Trump leaving office, that’s a scandal with Bill Barr’s fingerprints all over it. So while it’s possible Barr’s motives for laying the rhetorical groundwork for some sort twisted civil holy war are primarily rooted in his long-held theocratic view, it’s also possible he’s primarily interested at this point in simply covering his own ass by framing any investigation into his actions as part of a ‘secular conspiracy’ against the righteous, much like his heathen boss has been trying to do.
President Trump became the first sitting president ever to attend the anti-abortion March for Life rally a few days ago in what appeared to be a typical ‘red meat’ rally designed to keep his core supporters — conservative Evangelical Christians — happy in the face of an ongoing impeachment trial in the Senate. But It’s worth keeping in mind that there’s another core audience Trump may have had in mind when he attended that rally: the powerful far right millionaires and billionaires who own much of the talk radio infrastructure in the United States and who finance theocratic organizations like the Council for National Policy (CNP). Billionaires extremely close to Trump like Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince, and Robert Mercer. It’s that quiet ownership of the US’s talk radio networks by the patrons of the theocratic far right that the following pair of articles describes. They also described how Trump’s ongoing impeachment trial might be causing these theocrats extra consternation because it threatens Vice President Mike Pence too, a long-time favorite politicians of this network.
The first article describes the crucial role regional talk radio has played in putting out the Trump’s message to the Republican base and how the Trump team has gone out of its way to cultivate relationships with regional right-wing talk radio hosts to ensure they remain Trump super-fans. As the article notes, Trump himself largely emulates the persona of a right-wing talk radio host and in many respects the rise of right-wing talk radio made a politician like Trump somewhat inevitable. It also mentions now the same theocrats behind the CNP are also behind the rise of regional right-wing talk radio networks like the Salem network that started off as a small Christian fundamentalist operation and expanded to more than 2,000 radio stations across the country (in addition to Salem’s growing portfolio of conservative websites).
As the second article notes, when Trump selected Mike Pence to be his vice presidential candidate, this move was done in part to please this crucial factions of GOP power brokers. And they still want to see Mike Pence become president some day, a dream that’s become all the more complicated by an impeachment trial that threatens to engulf Pence too. It’s an important reminder that the real power brokers behind the GOP may be extra hesitant to see the right-wing media complex concede any wrong-doing at all on the part of the Trump administration as the impeachment trial plays out because those admissions could end up damaging Pence too and they still have plans for Pence. As the second article also notes, following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Republican mega-donor networks behind the CNP sort of merged with the Koch Brother donor network, with the heads of Koch-backed organizations — including Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party Patriots — joining the CNP at the same time CNP donors funded Koch initiatives. In other words, we’re talking about a largely unified right-wing oligarchy that is behind this national talk-radio media complex.
The second article also describes how the CNP has had a long-term strategy of motivating politically unengaged evangelicals and they’ve found they can best motivate this group of about 17 million voters by focusing on scare tactics involving abortion and LGBT rights. Bombarding this demographic with scary false messages — like Democrats conspire to “execute babies on the day of their birth” and schoolchildren face a mortal danger of sexual assault by transgender people using public restrooms — appears to be particularly effective in getting this group to the polls. It’s a story that’s inevitably intertwined with the reasons right-wing conspiracy theories have become such a popular tool in recent years (like #PizzaGate) because right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be focused on generating fears about some sort of diabolical Satanic plot against Christians and that’s presumably pretty good at motivating unmotivated Christian fundamentalists to vote.
So this right-wing media complex that’s spent decades spewing out all sorts of lies and disinformation remains a crucial source of support for a president who seems to have a pathological need to lie, and thus far this relationship between the lying media and the lying president appears to be completely intact. In part because Trump’s team has gone out of its way to court these regional right-wing talk radio hosts and in part because the Trump administration has proven willing to do the bidding of the powerful oligarch networks that actual own the media complex. Ok, first, here’s a Washington Post story about how the Trump team has been cultivating a loyal army of regional right-wing talk radio hosts, creating a set of relationships that is now extra useful in the context of a damning impeachment trial. Because when the facts aren’t on your side, having an army of dissemblers in charge regurgitating those facts to audiences comes in really handy:
“Far from the White House and Capitol Hill, Fredericks is one of hundreds of regional radio hosts across the country who have found themselves in the improbable position of being showered with attention by Trump officials and surrogates. While granting access to local media has long been an important element of running a national political campaign, Trump officials have made it a central part of their strategy.”
The Talk Radio President is running a Talk Radio reelection strategy. A strategy that include frequent interviews with radio hosts most people have never hear of, with the hope of receiving disproportionately favorable coverage from these hosts in return:
But another reason talk radio has been an important element for Trump’s reelection strategy is because right-wing talk radio continues to expand thanks to the billionaires behind the CNP, like Betsy DeVos and the Mercers, who have been paying for this expansion. That’s according to a new book by Anne Nelson, “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right”:
““These conservative networks have expanded even as local newspapers around the country have dwindled...They have “gobbled up independent and local stations, boosted their signals, and made them into an unseen powerhouse in the middle of the country.””
Yep, even as local newspapers have been dying off, regional right-wing talk radio has been expanding thanks to the investments of these theocratic oligarchs who also happen to be key backers of Trump. Now here’s an article from October by Anne Nelson that describes more of what she covers in her new book “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.” As Nelson describes, this group of theocratic billionaires behind the CNP didn’t just play a critical role in the rise of Donald Trump when they effectively gave him their blessing in 2016. They’ve been backing the rise of Mike Pence for years, and Trump’s selection of Pence as a vice president could be seen as payback for their support. And following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the CNP and the Koch donor networks largely merged. So when Trump plays tribute to the CNP, he’s paying tribute to a core element of the the GOP power base. In other words, when Trump pays tribute to the theocratic hard right, he’s paying tribute to the true kings of the swamp:
“Over the past few decades the traditional GOP has been overtaken by partisans of the Radical Right, now entrenched in the party’s infrastructure. This shadow network of hardline organizations, activists and donors stands ready to outlast the Trump presidency. The story of the CNP, a hub in this network, is a case study in how the durability and strategic capacity of right-wing institutions have shaped the American political landscape.”
Yes, is the Radical Right infrastructure that took over the GOP in recent decades that has become the core support base for Trump. Not just support for Trump in terms of voters but also support from the key power-brokers that financed this takeover. A fusion of theocrats and the oil industry that goes back to 1981 with Reagan’s election. A merger that was completed following Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 with the merger of the CNP and the Koch network:
Other CNP figures close to Trump include Kellyanne Conawy and Jay Sekulow, who is currently part of Trump’s impeachment defense team. Mike Pence used to brief the CNP on a weekly basis when in congress:
And in return for their support, the CNP has had immense influence over the Republican Party’s platform and the Trump judicial nominations. Recall how, as we’ve see, the far right Federalist Society pretty much has unchecked power over Trump’s judicial nomination and the figure running that operation, Leonard Leo, was also running entities that appear to be set up to facilitate large ‘Dark Money’ anonymous political contributions to Trump. It’s an example of how the infrastructure of these movements in the post-Citizens United environment often consists of corporate shell companies set up for political money-laundering to ensure the ‘pay-to-play’ system of buying politicians and policy can operate smoothly:
And, finally, the article mentions how the CNP’s long-term strategy focuses on identify unmotivated evangelicals and scaring them into voting with deceptive fear-mongering campaigns that focus abortion and LGBT rights:
Given that much of the GOP’s rhetoric these days largely focus on putting out some sort of deceptive scare-mongering message about a left-wing plot against conservatives, it’s a reminder that the CNP’s core long-term strategy is basically the Republican Party’s core long-term strategy at this point and a reflection of the extent the CNP really has captured the party. So as this impeachment process plays out, keep in mind that one of the primary political forces backing Trump has an interest in not admitting anything that might damage Mike Pence’s political future and a long-term strategy of scaring voters with lies about diabolical Democratic plots and a vast network of right-wing talk radio stations capable of pushing any deceptive messaging campaign it wants across the US. In other words, if you thought the right-wing media’s behavior couldn’t get any more damning than the ‘#PizzaGate’ lows of 2016, just get ready for 2020.
Now that the acquittal of President Trump is all but certain in the Senate #UkraineGate impeachment trial following the decision of Senate Republicans not to allow witnesses, it appears that the Republican Party is formally sanctioning both the solicitation of foreign influence in elections (which is what first happened with the Poroshenko government) and also the use of presidential powers to extort foreign governments into providing that influence if they weren’t otherwise inclined to do so (which is what happened after Volodymyr Zelensky beat Poroshenko). It’s the kind of result to the Senate trial that’s going to once again lead to hopeful calls for some sort of Republican Party soul searching, something that’s becoming an increasingly dark joke.
So since the Republican Party appears to now endorse the idea of turning US elections into international group efforts, it seems like a good time to remind ourselves that the Republican Party can increasingly be viewed as just the US-wing of an increasingly intertwined global far movement that’s been consolidating political and economic power across the world for decades and represents a kind of ‘come out’ phase of international fascism. It’s one of the grand ironies of the right-wing embrace of ‘nationalism’: it’s an international ‘nationalist’ movement that brands itself as ‘populist’ and yet is guided by largely the same far right aristocratic and patriarchal ideology and vision. Each country is free to create its own culture...as long as it’s a far right culture. If not, that international movement will work in coordination to crush that society until the far right ‘nationalists’ have regained control. That’s literally the new ‘New World Order’ we’re seeing emerge after decades of successfully far right networking and a reconsolidation of power in the post-WWII environment. Global control by a gang ‘nationalist’ far right movements that work together to crush any society that doesn’t comply. It’s the kind of vision that assumes there’s going to be A LOT more solicitation for foreign influence in elections.
It’s that context of a global far right network of movements that work together across border to help each other take power and keep it that makes the following article from back in April so relevant today following the end of a Senate impeachment trial that appears to endorse the presidential recruitment of foreign help. The article also relates to the recent reports about a power struggle at the Vatican led by a group of far right Catholics — including Steve Bannon, Italian far right politician Matteo Salvini, and the German Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis — to repeal various reforms by Pope Francis opposed by the Church’s ultra-conservative wing. The article about the World Congress of Families conference that took place in Verona last April. As the article describes, the conference is basically an international networking event for the Christian far right. The ostensible theme of the conference is the alleged left wing attack on ‘the family’, with much of focus on the threat of feminism and the LGBTQ community. There’s also a barely veiled white nationalist alarmism over a perceived demographic crisis of too few white babies. In other words, it was basically an conference of the international ‘respectable’ reactionary far right that hide behind the mask of ‘traditional values’.
The conference included powerful figures in the religious, business, and political world from across the globe and stressed the need for international cross-border cooperation and coordination in assuring the far right takes political power everywhere. Salvini and Princess Gloria were both featured speakers, along with Brian Brown, who leads the anti-gay marriage group US National Organization for Marriage. Brown now also runs the International Organization for the Family, which coordinates the WCF network. It’s an example of how the WCF is very much tied into the organized US religious right. Recall how, last March, weeks before this conference, there was a report about US evangelical groups spending tens of millions of dollars supporting European far right political parties and movements. This conference is the public face of that increasingly intertwined international far right network. And that international far right network has big plans to continue helping itself internationally. Hence the need for granting the president the right to solicit another government for help in elections. From the perspective the far right’s vision of a global confederation of far right movements that jointly control the world, international far right coordination is both an ends and a means:
““This culture war is a global war”, an ultra-conservative Spanish activist says, in one of the day’s more militaristic speeches. “Enemies,” he explains, have “infiltrated all institutions” from political parties to the United Nations. But, he offers encouragingly, the tide is turning. Now, we must launch global campaigns in the ultra-conservative fight-back, collaborating across borders. We must also seize power: directly or indirectly, by “controlling the environment” in which politicians operate.”
It’s quite a rallying cry: “Now, we must launch global campaigns in the ultra-conservative fight-back, collaborating across borders. We must also seize power: directly or indirectly, by “controlling the environment” in which politicians operate.” And yet that’s precisely what we’ve seen increasingly happening for years. An international network of authoritarian movements. It’s what Steve Bannon has been openly developing for years now. And as this conference makes clear, ‘populist’ international network is heavily backed by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. Powerful people who view Victor Orban’s Hungary as a model society:
The conference swag even included a gift from ProVita, an Italian anti-abortion group that’s both a key organizer of the even and has well documented ties to the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party. It’s an example of the utility rallying around ‘traditional values’ has for the mainstreaming of fascism:
There’s also Princess Gloria, one of the most anticipated speakers (who also happens to be orchestrating some sort of ultra-conservative Pope coup at that Vatican with Steve Bannon). She was joined on staged by Brian Brown, the American evangelical who runs the International Organization for the Family, which coordinates the WCF network. It’s a reminder of how extensively the far right wing of US evangelical community is involved in building this international movement:
So that’s all part of the context of the Republican Party’s open endorsement of soliciting international help in domestic political elections during the Senate impeachment trial. Soliciting international help for fellow travelers is the plan to seize control and crush the left is the plan. The short-term plan and long-term plan. As George Orwell famously warned, If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. Seizing power and them stamping out all opposition forever. That’s the big plan and it’s going to require a lot of international coordination. Indefinitely. International coordination the GOP has now formally endorsed for the foreseeable future.
President Trump is expected to announce on Saturday his Supreme Court pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsgurg with federal judge Amy Coney Barrett at the top candidate by all accounts.
So as with all Republican Supreme Court nominees, we have to ask what particular genre of far right judicial activist will Barrett end up being? Will she be more of a corporatist? A theocrat? A general authoritarian? All of the above? What corrupt form of legal and civic insanity will she inflict upon the US for decades to come?
Well, based on what we so far about Barrett, not only does she have strong theocratic tendencies but she has spent her entire life as a member of a small tight-knit far right group, People of Praise, that was one of the real life inspirations for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The small eucumenical charismatic movement — which is 90 percent Catholic but includes many of the practices associated with charismatic protestants — has around 1800 adult members in North America. Those charismatic practices includes practices that sound awfully close to the “shepherding” movement within Christianity that even Charismatic leaders have acknowledged was cult-like. People of Praise has members swear lifelong loyalty oaths to each other. The parents of both Barret and her husband played leadership roles in the People of Praise so she’s apparently been with the group her entire life.
And while there’s a question over whether or not Atwood was specifically inspired by People of Praise or an ideologically similar Catholic Charismatic group, People of Hope, it’s undeniable that People of Praise is exactly of group Atwood has said inspired her to write the book. On top of teaching that men are the authority figure in their families, including over their wives, People of Praise literally assigns personal advisers to each member and call the advisers for women “Handmaids”. Or at least used to do that before the group first received scrutiny back in 2017 when Barrett was seen as a potential selection for Justice Kennedy’s open seat. The “Handmaids” are now called “Woman Leaders”. These personal advisers give direction on important decisions like whom to date or marry, where to live, and whether to take a job or buy a home.
But in addition to questions over Barrett’s ties to People of Praise and what influence a cult-like group like that might have over her decision-making, there’s also the question of who else is going to be influencing her decisions because, as we’re going to see, it sounds like the theocratic far right Catholic branch of the legal community has been grooming Barrett to become a possible Supreme Court justice since her first year in law school. That’s a lot of grooming.
From a thematic standpoint it’s kind of perfect: the judge who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and guarantee the end of the Roe v Wade hails from the kind of Catholic cult that literally inspired The Handmaid’s Tale and has been groomed by the legal far right from the very beginning of her education. Keep in mind that since Barrett grew up in the People of Praise movement it’s entirely possible her “Handmaid” advised her to go into law. In other words, for all we know her ‘grooming’ could have preceded law school and based on what we know about People of Praise it seems like a near certainty that the group played a role in her decision to enter law in the first place. So one of the many questions about the likely replacement for RBG is the question of what her “Handmaid” has been instructing her to do as she’s traveled this long path to the Supreme Court:
“But Barrett, who started her career as a clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and has been described as his “ideological heir” due to her staunchly conservative stance on the subjects of abortion and healthcare, has one affiliation that is perhaps most concerning. According to author Margaret Atwood, her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale was inspired (read: haunted) by multiple religious groups, which many believe includes People of Praise, which Barrett is reportedly affiliated with.”
She’s an inspirational pick...for dystopian novelists thinking about writing a book about a cult capturing a society:
Has Amy Coney Barrett been faithful to the directives of her Handmaid? Who is her Handmaid anyway and what kind of advice does this person give? These are just a few of the questions first raised back in 2017 when the New York Times first reported on her ties to the group. A report that includes warnings from legal scholars that what we’re learning about People of Praise, like its loyalty oaths and “Handmaids”, that raises legitimate questions about questions about her independence and impartiality.
As the article also notes, when Barrett was nominated for the federal judgeship in 2017, she never identified her membership in People of Praise and therefore questions about her relationship with the group never came up so we have yet to hear how she’ll answer questions about her membership in what appears to be a religious cult:
“Ms. Barrett told the senators that she was a faithful Catholic, and that her religious beliefs would not affect her decisions as an appellate judge. But her membership in a small, tightly knit Christian group called People of Praise never came up at the hearing, and might have led to even more intense questioning.”
Somehow she just forgot to list her lifelong membership in a religious group that requires its members to make lifetime loyalty oaths to each other when filling out the Senate questionaire. It must have been an innocent mistake...and not an attempt to hide her membership in a creepy cult:
And note that critics of the group include one of the founding members who was kicked out after he questions the directives given to his wife by her “Handmaid”:
Finally, here’s a piece that makes clear how the questions about Barrett’s loyalties shouldn’t be limited to her relationship with People of Praise. Because it turns out her legal education coincided with a period when the conservative movement concluded following the failure of Robert Bork’s nomination that it needed to identify future Supreme Court nominees when they’re young and ensure they are both ideologically pure while generating the kind of resumes that will eventually put them on the court. In other words, they were looking for young far right judicial Manchurian candidates and one them in Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and now Amy Coney Barrett:
“The group was part of a growing legal movement opposed to the secularization of American society generally and to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. The 1973 abortion-rights decision not only struck many conservatives as an affront their religious values, but to the principle of judicial restraint. To wage what would be a decades-long fight to reverse the activist decisions of the court from 1950s to the 1970s, they needed young legal minds like Barrett’s.”
As we can see, the legal movement that emerged in the 60s and 70s opposed to the secularization of American society generally has come to fruition. It has now secured a generation lock on the Supreme Court and cultivating Manchurian candidates has been crucial to that endeavor:
The movement has been highly loyal to Barrett and she’s repaid their loyalty. It’s part of why there are so many legitimate questions about her independence. She’s a life-long member of a cult that includes loyalty oaths and spent virtually her entire adult life as the member of the informal conservative legal cult that is dedicated to ending secularism in America. So the question isn’t whether or not Coney Barrett is a member of a cult. It’s more a question of how Barrett will balance her various cult loyalties when they conflict. Like, what happens in her Handmaid tells her to vote one way while her Federalist Society fellows want a different ruling? Although since the Federalist Society is so ideologically aligned with theocratic movements like People of Praise (it’s all one big Cult of Power at some level) there probably shouldn’t be too many loyalty conflicts.
The questions swirling around Amy Coney Barrett’s membership in the People or Praise religious group suspected of being a cult are now set to be at the center of the national debate over her nomination to the Supreme Court now that President Trump has formally nominated her to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. And that in turn raises a question that probably has the leadership of People of Praise rather freaked out about right now: will ex-members now start coming forward to publicly share stories of an abusive cult-like culture? It’s the inevitable downside for secretive groups like People of Praise when one of their members reaches a station of public prominence.
So here’s a pair of articles that gives what could be a sort of preview of the kinds of stories we might expect to hear. The first article from a few days ago includes allegations from former member Coral Anika Theill who has called the group a cult and claims that women are expected to be completely obedient to men and independent thinkers are “humiliated, interrogated, shamed and shunned.” The article also includes an interview of scholar of comparative religion, Thomas Csordas, who wrote in 1996, “When I first encountered Atwood’s book, I was frankly jolted by the similarity of terminology to that prevalent in some of the Catholic charismatic ‘covenant communities’ I had been studying,” although Csordas says that while People of Praise is a “very conservative” group he wouldn’t consider them an actual cult and instead refers to them as an ‘intentional community’ and adds that other charismatic Christian community’s he’s studied are more authoritarian. It points to what will probably be one of the main defenses of People of Praise if its cult status become a topic of national debate: well, at least it’s not the most authoritarian charismatic Christian group out there...it’s just a highly secretive ‘intentional community’ and therefore there’s nothing to worry about:
“Coral Anika Theill, a former People of Praise member, has been strongly critical of the group, calling it a “cult” and saying in an interview women are expected to be completely obedient to men and independent thinkers are “humiliated, interrogated, shamed and shunned.””
A group where women are expected to be obedient and independent thinkers are “humiliated, interrogated, shamed and shunned.” That sure sounds pretty cult‑y! But Thomas Csordas — who notes that more authoritarian charismatic Community groups exist, an appallingly low bar — prefers to refer to the group as an ‘intentional community’. An intentional community that just happens to have a stunning degree of similarity to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:
And note the stance Barrett herself is taking at this point when it comes to these question: she’s not giving interview or comments to the media. It’s not exactly the kind of strategy that’s going to dispel the cult concerns:
And now here’s a July 2018 article in the National Catholic Reporter about People of Praise and Barrett’s relationship with the group that includes more details ex-members including Coral Anika Theill. Theill describes an environment with strict gender-role divisions that emphasized women’s submission. Secrecy toward outsiders is another feature...and something Barrett herself implicitly demonstrated by the fact that she never mentioned her membership in the group on her Senate questionnaire for her federal judgeship when she was nominated to the position in 2017 resulting in the topic never coming up during her 2017 Senate hearing.
Theill and others describe a system of strict control over members’ lives by the “heads”. And while the group defends itself by pointing out that the “heads” (for men) and “handmaids” (for women) are merely lay adviser who provide advice and wisdom to members, the ex-members point out that the “heads” are almost always leaders in the group and they don’t keep what they’re told in confidence and share it with the other leaders. So what is supposed to be a system for personal counseling is in reality a system where the group leadership can collectively control the group. But don’t call it a cult:
“Other former members of covenanted communities — including some on the ex-members’ Facebook group — also would like Barrett to address her involvement in the group, which they see as different than having to defend her Catholicism, as she was asked to in last year’s hearings”
Yes, as these ex-members point out, asking Amy Coney Barrett to explain her relationship to this group isn’t asking her to defend her Catholicism. The group is ecumenical after all and the teachings of Catholicism are a matter of public record. What isn’t a matter of public record is the nature of the teachings of this hyper-secretive group:
And as founding member Adrian Reimers points out, the “headship” model of pastoral care that the group tries to explain away as merely a system of members giving each other private confidential advice is in reality a model where personal advisers are almost always group leaders who share what they’re told with the other leaders. So it really is a community were individual members are told how to live by the group leadership. But, again, don’t call it a cult:
It’s also worth noting that teachings in the group include the idea of that sexual activity is only appropriate between married straight couples, a teaching echoed by Barrett signing a petition arguing against the rule in Obamacare requiring employers to provide access to birth control. It’s a reminder that the coming era of illegal abortion will also be an era of increased unplanned pregnancies:
Finally, note one of the other chilling potential explanations for why Barrett has refused to publicly discuss her relationship with this group: it’s typical of the group’s belief that male elders speak for the community:
Perhaps that should be the follow up question for Barrett after she refuses to answer questions about her ties to the group: so are you unable to talk about this because that’s the role of the male elders?