“One nation under God.” It’s a familiar phrase for modern Americans, even if it was largely a construct of corporate America during the New Deal to sell the public on the idea the capitalism and Christianity are inseparable [1]. But how about the phrase “One nation under God, and one religion under God”? That was the eyebrow-raising call made by Michael Flynn during an appearance at the “Reawaken America Tour” at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church back in November. And while it would be nice to dismiss this kind of theocratic language as just the latest unhinged comment from Flynn, it turns out the concept of “One nation under God, and one religion under God” is much more popular than many American’s would like to assume. Popular among the right-wing oligarchy in particular. Theocracy is popular with the powerful. Imagine that.
Yes, it’s theocracy brought to you by the Koch network, with figures like David Barton — long the GOP’s theocrat of choice — leading the way. That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this post. The Koch-ocracy isn’t just a corporatocracy. It’s theocratic too. And long been so, out in the open. For example, recall some of the Barton highlights we’ve seen over the years:
* In 1993 [2], Barton spoke at the Concerned Women for America convention about the Christian Reconstructionist creed. He says that the basis for American laws should be ‘whatever is Christian is legal. Whatever isn’t Christian is illegal.’
* In 2011 [3], Barton and Newt Gingrich created a video that claimed the US Constitution aws based on the Old Testament.
* In 2012 [4], Barton teamed up with Glenn Beck to write a ‘controversial’ book about Thomas Jefferson that argued Jefferson was an orthodox Christian who did not believe in the separation of church and state.
* In early 2013 [5], we learn that Beck and Barton were going to “go Galt” and create an entirely self-sustaining independent community that would provide all its own food and energy. At the center, David Barton will create a giant “national archive”/learning center where people can send their children to be “deprogrammed” and elected officials can come to learn “the truth.” They just needed a cool $2 billion to get it started, which obviously didn’t happen. But that was the plan. Deprogramming centers for children co-founded with Glenn Beck.
* As Ed Kilgore noted in 2014 [6], Barton really is the unofficial historian of the GOP’s “Constitutional Conservative” caucus of elected officials, ranging from Michelle Bachmann to Ted Cruz. Recall that this is a glimpse at the pre-Trump GOP, when Cruz and Bachmann’s in the GOP — led by Ted Cruz before Trump came along and took over the party — fixation on Barton that underscores just how bad faith a caucus it truly it. The caucus literally relies on a historical revisionist. It’s not like Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck don’t realize Barton is peddling garbage. They don’t care. It’s part of what makes this movement so chilling: its a movement intent on capturing and controlling the morality of a society led by people dripping with open bad faith
* In 2016 [7], Barton was brought in to run the “Keep the Promise” pro-Ted Cruz super-PAC. It turns out [8] it was Rebekah Mercer who brought Barton in for that position, as part of a power struggle over the direction of the PAC with fellow mega-donor Tony Neubeauer.
That’s just a sampling of the profound role David Barton has played in facilitating and fostering the worst kinds of theocratic impulses of the GOP. And he’s like a god in the GOP.
But this story isn’t just about the cynical reliance of the GOP and the Koch network of mega-donors on people like Barton to push a merger of church and stage. As we’re going to see, one of the biggest players in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results was the Council for National Policy (CNP), a group literally founded in 1981 as a merger of televangelists, oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan 1980 victory and secure their joint agenda. A joint agenda of reversing advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and political power. For four decades this group of hundreds of the most powerful people in DC — including figures like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway [9] — have been advancing this corporatist theocratic agenda, culminating in a what could only be called preemptive coup plans for 2020. And yes, David Barton is a CNP member [9].
As we’re going to see, CNP members were some of the most aggressive figures in the efforts to find any excuse they could to force the overturning of the popular vote in the 2020 presidential election. This includes:
* David Barton: You can find an example of Barton pushing the now classic ‘Smartmatic voting machines stole the election’ story on Clay Clark’s Thrivetime show here [10]. Clark organizes the ReAwaken America Tour that Michael Flynn was speaking at when Flynn made his call for ‘One Nation Under One Religion’ [11]. In doing so, Barton was giving his blessing to the wildest voter fraud theories to a large audience who trusts him.
* Cleta Mitchell: A Republican lawyer who has long operated as one of the GOP’s long-standing go-to conservative for justifying the worst kind of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics [12]. Recall how Mitchell was sitting in on the now notorious Jan 2, 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger demanding that they “find” the votes he needed to win the state, resulting in Mitchell’s law firm effectively kicking her out of the firm [13]. Mitchell’s involvement in overturning the 2020 election arguably goes back to August of 2019, when she co-chaired a high-level working group that ended up advocating for radical reading of the constitution that would enable state legislatures to override the popular vote [14].
* Mark Meckler: A CNP Gold Circle member, Meckler co-founded the Convention of States Action (COS) along with long-time Koch associate Eric O’Keefe. Recall how the Convention of States project is a long-stand Koch-financed effort to trigger an Article V Convention of States that threatens to rewrite the entire US constitution [15]. After the CNP took the lead in organizing anti-COVID-lockdown protests in states around the US [16], Meckler announced that he was temporarily converting the COS into “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other.” Oh, and David Barton’s WallBuilders group is part of the COS effort. Yes, it turns out Barton’s historical revisionism comes in handy when one is planning on overhauling the constitution.
* Lisa Nelson: The CEO of the Koch-back American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC), Nelson was at a CNP event in February of 2020 — right as the COVID pandemic was getting started — when she informed the group she was already working with GOP attorneys on methods for overturning the popular vote in the upcoming presidential election. One of the GOP lawyers she told them she was working with was Cleta Mitchell [17].
* Amy Kremer: It was Amy and her daughter Kylie who headed up the Women for America First group that ended up organizing the January 6 rally at the Ellipse. Recall how Amy and Kylie obtained three ‘burner’ cellphones that were reportedly used for some untraceable communications with a range of figures involved with the Trump White House and various ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts [18].
* Steve Bannon: Nuff said.
* Ali Alexander: Yes, Roger Stone’s acolyte is a CNP member too [9]! Recall how Stone founded StopTheSteal in 2016 to help Trump win the GOP nomination [19]. But Ali Alexander became its public face and leader during the post-2020 election period in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And as we saw, the Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol was seen as the more “wild” rally planned for Jan 6 — as opposed to the Women for America First rally at the Ellipse — and appears to have been the event from which the insurrection actually emerged [20]. Alexander was also making chants of “Victory or Death” at the Jan 5 Stop the Steal rally in DC [21]. Michael Flynn spoke at that same Jan 5 rally.
And that’s just a sampling of the known CNP members [9] who were taking active steps to ensure Donald Trump won the 2020 election through any means necessary. Let’s also recall the critical role CNP members Russell J. Ramsland and J. Keet Lewis played in the lead up to the insurrection. Ramsland’s private intelligence company, Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), was started in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Starting in 2018, Ramsland became a leading GOP purveyor of mass voter fraud allegations. And in the days leading up to the insurrection, Ramsland was joined by retired Army colonel and psychological warfare expert Phil Waldron as they operated in Steve Bannon’s and Rudy Giuliani’s “war room” operating out of the Willard Hotel [22].
Also note that while Michael Flynn isn’t listed on any of the leaked CNP membership lists, he did reportedly speak at a 2016 CNP event. And he’s obviously a theocrat who networks with other theocrats. It would be surprising if Flynn was working extremely closely with the CNP. At the same time, his open calls for a theocracy might make him a little to ‘hot’ to have a formal member. But there’s no question Flynn and the CNP share an agenda.
Project Blitz: It’s Like ALEC for Theocracy
But there’s another aspect to this story of the growing theocratic ambitions of this network: Project Blitz. Launched in 2015, Project Blitz is like the ALEC of theocracy, operating as a ‘bill mill’ focused on generating model legislation designed to be used by federal and state legislator to further this same theocratic agenda. A bill mill literally dedicated to getting Christianity enshrined in law as the US’s moral foundation with special legal protections for people acting according to those beliefs.
Run by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, Project Blitz works in concert with David Barton’s WallBuilders. It also turns out the sole employee of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, Lee Carawan, is a CNP member too, along with her husband Rolfe [9]. She sits on the Project Blitz steering committee
Project Blitz is being executed using a three-tiered strategy. The first tier focuses on pushing bills that protect prayer in school and other public spaces. The second tier aims at getting the government involved in actively “Christianizing” America. The third tier then works on laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices. Specifically bigoted beliefs and practices. It’s literally a vision where conservative Christians get special legally protected rights to be bigots that no other group would get, based on a vision of the US as a divinely founded nation that should be following some form of Biblical law. Extra rights for Christians. Conservative Christians in particular. As we’ll see, David Barton and many of the rest of these figures are followers of Seven Mountain Dominionism — a sect of Christianity that believes it is up to Christians to take political power before Jesus will return [23] — and that’s the kind of Christianity that will demand complete conformity when it takes power. Conformity that will be defined, in part, by the theological whims of prominent religious leaders. A true merger of church and state really is what they have in mind. As researcher Frederick Clarkson put it, the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to The Handmaid’s Tale.
And as we’re also going to see, despite some setbacks, like the insurrection not working , Project Blitz is moving ahead. The ‘bill mill’ is active and working. So when we’re forced to ask “what’s next?” following what amounted to an organized attempt to overturn the 2020 election by America’s leading theocrats, part of the sad answer is “more ProjectBlitz-ing”. That’s what’s next. The attempted theft of the election and insurrection is just a once-every-four-years thing. Project Blitz never stops. It’s always what’s next.
It’s that broader story of the longstanding and ongoing theocratic power grab, a corporatist theocratic power grab, that we’re going to cover in this post. A power grab that arguably started with the formation of the CNP on 1981 and culminated in the 2020 push to overturn the election, capped off with the January 6 Capitol insurrection. A power grab that wasn’t actually slowed by the failure of the insurrection. The insurrection was fomented by people so people already they could pull off a coup attempt, fail, and still largely face no repercussions. Project Blitz continues while the CNP pushes new voter suppression initiatives across the US. Onward Christian [24] soldier.
A Look at God’s Plan. A Plan for More Prayer. Specific Prayer. And Lower Taxes
Ok, so here’s a review of our look at this ongoing theocratic network. A network playing a key role in both collapsing the separation of church and state and collapsing the public’s faith in the integrity of US elections.
* November 21, 2021: [25] Michael Flynn and the Christian Right’s Plan to Turn America Into a Theocracy [26]:
Michael Flynn’s call for “One nation under God, and one religion under God,” at the “Reawaken America Tour” visit to John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX, wasn’t just the latest example of Flynn transgressing a line of democratic decency [27]. It was Flynn reflecting a growing openness on the Christian right to talk about undemocratic measures. Including violence. It also reflected a notable level of support for viewing the US as a fundamentally Christian nation found across the US populace. As of August 2021, a national Public Discourse and Ethics survey found that 39 percent of Americans agree that the founding documents are divinely inspired, 34 percent believe that the success of America is part of God’s plan, and 25 percent believe that the federal government should go ahead and formally declare the U.S. a Christian nation.
* November 16, 2021 [28]: If you’re paying attention to Christian nationalism, you won’t be shocked by Michael Flynn’s call for ‘one religion under God’ [29]:
As the Baptist News also observed following Michael Flynn’s call for “One nation under God, and one religion under God,” Flynn wasn’t just echoing the general popularity in the idea for the idea of formally declaring the US a Christian country. Flynn was articulating the rationale behind Project Blitz, the Christian far right’s current political project dedicated to formally making the US a Christian nation, with special Christian protections. Special protections that translate into real political power.
* Sept 28, 2015 [30]: Prayer Caucus, funded by taxpayers, defends faith in the public square [31]:
In 2015, USA Today ran a piece on the parent organization operates Project Blitz. The Congressional Prayer Caucus’s non-profit, The Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, launched Project Blitz in 2016. It’s a tiny operation in terms of personnel, with just one paid employee, Lea Carawan, who sits on the Project Blitz steering committee. Both Lea and her husband Rolfe are members of the CNP [32].
* April 13, 2019 [33]: The plot against America: Inside the Christian right plan to “remodel” the nation [34]:
A closer look at Project Blitz and the role ‘historian’ David Barton plays in the project. Project Blitz is more or less a three-part plan to enshrine Barton’s historically warped vision of the founding of the US. And at the heart of that three-part plan is an ALEC-like dedication to operating a ‘bill mill’ of model legislation that can be passed along legislators around the nation. It’s why Project Blitz can be so influential with just a handful of staff. You don’t need a large number of people to run a bill mill.
* August 11, 2012 [35]: David Barton, Christian Scholar, Faces a Backlash [36]:
A look back a brief moment when it appeared David Barton’s star may have fallen. He was so popular back in 2011 that Mike Huckabee introduced Barton at an event by declaring, “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it.” But in 2012, Barton faced a backlash. This was after a number of conservative historians actually took a look at the garbage content Barton was churning out and publicly scolded him. Now, as time told, Barton’s fall from grace was brief at most. He helped found Project Blitz after this, after all. The whole episode is emblematic of the role Barton has played throughout his career: he’s warmly embraced no matter how much garbage he gets caught spewing out because it’s garbage powerful people want to hear.
* May 5, 2011 [37]: David Barton – Extremist ‘Historian’ for the Christian Right [38]:
Another quick look back at the extremist roots of David Barton in this 2011 SPLC Barton profile. Yes, it turns out Barton was giving talks at the events of known Christian Identity groups in the early 90s. That’s where he began his theological career. Today, Barton’s theology is that of the Seven Mountains Dominionism, a strain of Christianity that calls for the church to take political control over seven different spheres of society before Jesus will return. It’s basically a recipe for a full blown theocracy. And also the kind of theology oligarchs love: unions, minimum wage laws, and environmental protections are are biblically prohibited under Barton’s form of Christianity.
* August 23, 2019 [39]: Convention of States Fires Up Base for Push to Rewrite U.S. Constitution [40]:
Not limited to providing theological justification for the merger of church and state, David Barton has been working on another project that would destroy the US: the Convention of States (COS) project. As we’ve seen, the Koch network of mega-donors has spent decades investing in triggering an Article V Constitutional Convention, threatening to rewrite the constitution according to the whims of the Koch mega-donor network [15] Barton’s WallBuilders group has been working with COS, co-founded by Mark Meckler. Yes, Meckler is a CNP member.
* Feb 22, 2021 [41]: How the CNP, a Republican Powerhouse, Helped Spawn Trumpism, Disrupted the Transfer of Power, and Stoked the Assault on the Capitol [42]:
Almost a year ago, The Washington Spectator gave us a massive profile on one of the most important organization operating in DC, the Council for National Policy (CNP), and the role it played in fomenting a variety of actions and propaganda designed to convince the public the election was stolen from Trump and justify the reversal of the election result. The article describes how the CNP kicked into action as the pandemic go underway, providing the White House with a list of 100 business executives who could help guide the White House through kickstarting the pandemic-stricken economy. Those actions appeared to mostly focus on whipping up public opposition to anti-COVID public health measures. But even before the CNP was running its anti-anti-COVID operation, key CNP figures like Cleta Mitchell and Lisa Nelson were actively planning with groups like ALEC for avenues of overturning the popular vote in the upcoming election.
* July 24, 2021 [43]: The Christian nationalist assault on democracy goes stealth — but the pushback is working [44]:
A July 2021 update on Project Blitz, at that point a roughly five year old project. And a much slicker and more ambitious project, with Project Blitz giving ‘bill mill’ advice on how to cloak the intent of the model legislation in secular-sounding language. Project Blitz also discovered the potent political power of fusing its agenda of granting legal protections to conservative Christians with hot-button topics like transgender youth or “critical race theory” (CRT) in schools and libraries. Keep in mind this update came several months before Republican Glenn Younkin’s CRT-fueled victory in the Virginia governor’s race [45].
* December 14, 2021 [46]: The network of election lawyers who are making it harder for Americans to vote [47]:
Finally, we’re look at a report from a few weeks ago about a crack team of GOP lawyers working with ALEC and spearheading voter suppression model legislation for use by state legislator. In other words, a voter suppression bill mill. Of the five lawyers listed as spearheading this effort, three are known members of the CNP: Cleta Mitchell, J Christian Adams, and Kenneth Blackwell. Yes, Mitchell is continuing her voter suppression work despite being kicked out of her law firm for gross malpractice in relation to her baseless voter fraud claims [13]. The other two lawers are Jason Snead and Hans von Spakovksy. As we’ve seen, Snead and Adams have a fairly recent history of working together on voter suppression experts (with both ended up getting chastised by judges for their inaccurate testimonies) [48]. And Spakovksy is one of the GOP’s long-stand voter suppression gurus [49]. Mitchell, Adams, and Spakovksy all attended a secret December 1 ALEC meeting where they strategized their voter suppression plans going forward.
Michael Flynn Call for “One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
Ok, first, here’s a Rolling Stone piece written about week after Michael Flynn made his jarring speech at the “Reawaken America Tour” at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX, openly calling for the United States to formally become a Christian nation. As the piece points out, it wasn’t jarring because of the content of Flynn’s speech. It was jarring because Flynn apparently felt comfortable openly making this call, reflecting what is a palpable growing radicalization of Christian nationalist movements. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study published in November, 26 percent of white evangelical Protestants (and 30 percent of Republicans) agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to save the country.” That’s paired with polling from August 2021 that found 39 percent of Americans agree that the founding documents are divinely inspired, 34 percent believe that the success of America is part of God’s plan, and 25 percent believe that the federal government should go ahead and formally declare the U.S. a Christian nation. That’s what made Michael Flynn’s speech so jarring. When he called for an official state religion, he was speaking for A LOT of other people [26]:
Rolling Stone
Michael Flynn and the Christian Right’s Plan to Turn America Into a Theocracy
As Alex Jones put it, “We’re gonna win in the end because… God WINS!”
By Alex Morris
November 21, 2021 12:05 PM ETThis past weekend, infamous FBI fibber Michael Flynn stood on a stage at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and spoke his truth: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” Christian nationalist mic drop. He’d finally said the quiet part out loud.
Which, to be fair, was maybe not even the craziest thing that happened at Cornerstone last weekend as it hosted podcast host Clay Clark’s “Reawaken America Tour” — a shitshow so very spectacular that Cornerstone, the church of famed end times Christian Zionist John Hagee, had to release a face-saving statement saying that maybe, just maybe, things had gone a little too far even for them (“Cornerstone Church is not associated with this organization and does not endorse their views.”) There was a woman wearing a Jewish-themed prayer shawl and blowing on a ram’s horn, because, as she explained it, “Demons tremble at the sound of the shofar.” There was My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell and disgraced political operative Roger Stone on hand to provide the event with a legitimate dose of illegitimacy. There was Alex Jones growling at attendees that “the devil’s reign on this planet is coming to an end” and that Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that “they chose SATAN! AND THEY! ARE GOING! TO FAIL!” There were rousing rounds of the oddly-devised [50] anti-Biden chant “Let’s go, Brandon” and worship music provided by Sean Feucht, graciously in attendance thanks to his failed run for California’s state legislature. There was also, presumably, nary a vaccinated person in the house.
But Flynn’s statements were notable not just because the quiet part was said out loud but because the quiet part has been getting louder and louder, with political and religious leaders calling explicitly for what amounts to a theocracy. Just last month, Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel used the debate stage to opine [51] that “we should be instilling faith in the classroom, in the workplace, and everywhere in society” because, as far as he’s concerned, “there’s no such thing as a separation of church and state.” (“We stand with General Flynn,” Mandel tweeted on Saturday.) Last year, Bill Barr informed the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that, to the extent such a separation does exist, it’s thanks to “militant secularists” who don’t understand that America would be better off if we just let Christians run the show. “It’s been a while since people were willing to say so loudly and so publicly that America is a Christian nation,” says Philip Gorski, a sociologist of religion at Yale. “You didn’t hear George Bush, senior or junior, saying anything like that. Certainly they had a way of alluding to Christian elements of the American experiment, and they could speak to Christians in a language that was a little bit veiled. But they never would have said anything like what Michael Flynn said the other day—surely not in public and probably not even in private.”
Naturally this kind of Christian nationalist talk ruffles major feathers, and with good reason. It sounds crazy because it is crazy. What would a formally Christian America actually look like? How would it be achieved? How would it get around the Constitution? Which version of Christianity would we use? And what would we do with the millions of citizens who happen to disbelieve in that “one religion under God?”
On the surface, such questions may seem like a logical retort to Flynn’s, but they also distort the fundamental issue. In pointing out the impracticalities of the logistics, such questions basically imply that Flynn can’t really mean what he’s saying. “Hell yes, he means it,” says Anthea Butler, professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Racism. “And whether or not he means it, somebody hearing it will mean it and believe it. What matters is that it’s being said, and somebody is receiving that message.”
More to the point, somebody is out there looking to receive it. The message that America should be a Christian nation, taken quite literally, is foundational to the Christian right. It is not a fringe belief but rather a rallying cry, the principle that animates — and excuses — their foray into the messy political realm, into the lowly things of this world. According to Matthew 25:31–46, when Jesus returns to earth, “All the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” In this so-called Judgment of the Nations, godly countries will be rewarded and ungodly ones punished, which means that in a conservative Christian’s mind, their own fate may in some way be wrapped up in the U.S.’s relation to certain wedge issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights. That, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining why, in 2018, 61 percent of evangelicals said the country was headed in the right direction [52] while 64 percent of everyone else begged to differ.
Though theocratic views range from a desire to simply elect “godly” leaders to a militant call for a nation-state governed entirely by Old Testament law (including a return to the practice of stoning), some form of theocratic thinking now runs through a large swath of the populace. As of August 2021, a national Public Discourse and Ethics survey found that 39 percent of Americans agree that the founding documents are divinely inspired, 34 percent believe that the success of America is part of God’s plan, and 25 percent believe that the federal government should go ahead and formally declare the U.S. a Christian nation.
That desire may be ahistorical—most founders were clear that a theocracy was exactly what they did not want—but it has pervasively peppered American history. One of the Confederacy’s complaints when seceding was that the U.S. Constitution did not sufficiently namecheck God — a concern that was apparently shared by some in the Union. In 1864, a delegation of the National Reform Association (the OG NRA) met with Lincoln to request the addition of a Christian amendment to the document “humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler among nations.” Lincoln politely blew them off, but the idea gained traction again after the school prayer rulings in the 1960s, and again after R.J. Rushdoony published his Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973, advocating not just American theocracy but an even more hardcore theonomy — a nation governed by biblical law.
If there is anything different this time around, it’s in the violence of the rhetoric. Here, there are no genteel delegations or academic tomes. In indiscriminately pulling the fringiest elements of American Christianity into his political coalition, Trump melded theocratic thinking with religious radicalization. The effect? According to a Public Religion Research Institute study published early this month, 26 percent of white evangelical Protestants (and 30 percent of Republicans) agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to save the country.” For the attendees of Reawake America, civil war is now a quaint concept; Holy War is more what they’re after these days. Or as Alex Jones put it this weekend, “We’re gonna win in the end because…God WINS!”
Which is why, among religious scholars, there’s a growing frustration with the constant pearl-clutching over what someone like Flynn might say paired with an ostensible lack of belief that he really, literally means it. Likewise, and especially after January 6, there’s a growing frustration with a political faction that believes it is fighting on the side of the angels going up against a political faction that still operates like a compromise can be made. “I mean, I want infrastructure,” says Butler. “I’m sick of the potholes in Philadelphia. But nobody seems to understand the real danger. It’s nice to build bridges, but you’re building bridges for them to come and get you.”
Perhaps the real motives of those like Flynn can be seen when one takes into account the fact that theocracy actually runs counter to the sort of faith these folks profess to espouse. “What confounds me is that undermining the First Amendment, undermining the separation of church and state, really is an attack on religion in American life,” says Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and historian of American religion at Dartmouth College. “The effect of the First Amendment was to establish a free marketplace for religion that has lent an energy and a dynamism to religion in America unmatched anywhere in the world. Why would those groups that have benefited most from this marketplace—namely evangelicals because they know how to compete better than anyone else—turn around and try to undermine the very system that has given them so much currency in the culture?”
One answer could be that the culture — the marketplace of public opinion — no longer matters to the Christian right. This is no longer a humble competition for souls. This is about power. And, quite possibly, violence. “There needs to be some kind of understanding when this kind of language ramps up that you have to pay attention to that,” says Butler. “Honestly, we’ve got jihadists in this country. They’re just Christian ones.” It’s the threat of violence implicit in Flynn’s words — rather than the explicit absurdity — that we should care about.
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“But Flynn’s statements were notable not just because the quiet part was said out loud but because the quiet part has been getting louder and louder, with political and religious leaders calling explicitly for what amounts to a theocracy. Just last month, Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel used the debate stage to opine [51] that “we should be instilling faith in the classroom, in the workplace, and everywhere in society” because, as far as he’s concerned, “there’s no such thing as a separation of church and state.” (“We stand with General Flynn,” Mandel tweeted on Saturday.) Last year, Bill Barr informed the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that, to the extent such a separation does exist, it’s thanks to “militant secularists” who don’t understand that America would be better off if we just let Christians run the show. “It’s been a while since people were willing to say so loudly and so publicly that America is a Christian nation,” says Philip Gorski, a sociologist of religion at Yale. “You didn’t hear George Bush, senior or junior, saying anything like that. Certainly they had a way of alluding to Christian elements of the American experiment, and they could speak to Christians in a language that was a little bit veiled. But they never would have said anything like what Michael Flynn said the other day—surely not in public and probably not even in private.””
Yes, when Michael Flynn called for “One nation under God, and one religion under God”, he wasn’t just saying the quiet part out loud. He was joining a growing chorus of people making similar calls. Formally ending the separation of Church and State is an increasingly popular idea in the United States.
But it’s not just that a growing number of US conservatives are open to the idea of ending the separation of church and state. It’s that this same demographic is also increasingly open to the idea of using political violence to secure political power permanently. It’s a particularly potent convergence of authoritarian impulses:
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Though theocratic views range from a desire to simply elect “godly” leaders to a militant call for a nation-state governed entirely by Old Testament law (including a return to the practice of stoning), some form of theocratic thinking now runs through a large swath of the populace. As of August 2021, a national Public Discourse and Ethics survey found that 39 percent of Americans agree that the founding documents are divinely inspired, 34 percent believe that the success of America is part of God’s plan, and 25 percent believe that the federal government should go ahead and formally declare the U.S. a Christian nation.That desire may be ahistorical—most founders were clear that a theocracy was exactly what they did not want—but it has pervasively peppered American history. One of the Confederacy’s complaints when seceding was that the U.S. Constitution did not sufficiently namecheck God — a concern that was apparently shared by some in the Union. In 1864, a delegation of the National Reform Association (the OG NRA) met with Lincoln to request the addition of a Christian amendment to the document “humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler among nations.” Lincoln politely blew them off, but the idea gained traction again after the school prayer rulings in the 1960s, and again after R.J. Rushdoony published his Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973, advocating not just American theocracy but an even more hardcore theonomy — a nation governed by biblical law.
If there is anything different this time around, it’s in the violence of the rhetoric. Here, there are no genteel delegations or academic tomes. In indiscriminately pulling the fringiest elements of American Christianity into his political coalition, Trump melded theocratic thinking with religious radicalization. The effect? According to a Public Religion Research Institute study published early this month, 26 percent of white evangelical Protestants (and 30 percent of Republicans) agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to save the country.” For the attendees of Reawake America, civil war is now a quaint concept; Holy War is more what they’re after these days. Or as Alex Jones put it this weekend, “We’re gonna win in the end because…God WINS!”
...
It’s that convergence of authoritarian impulses that we’re going to be focusing on in the rest of this post. A convergence of authoritarian impulses is happening at the highest levels of real political power. And as we’re going to see, while some manifestations of these authoritarian impulses are relatively new, the organizations and networks behind it are so deeply embedded in the US political establishment that you almost can’t distinguish between these movements and the broader Republican Party. A fusion of the Koch mega-donor network with the powerful Council for National Policy (CNP), an organization that itself was formed in 1981 as a coalition of business interests and the religious right. The most powerful networks inside the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement in the US have aligned around and agenda of permanently capturing political power under the banner of preserving Christianity in America. That’s who Michael Flynn was speaking to when he made that call for the US to fall under one religion. The religious of power.
Project Blitz: Stealth Theocracy, ALEC-style, Brought to You by the Congressional Prayer Caucus
And as the following piece in Baptist News points out, when Michael Flynn made that call for “One nation under God and one religion under God”, he wasn’t just echoing a growing general sentiment within the Christian evangelical community. He was articulating the rationale behind Project Blitz, the Christian far right’s current political project dedicated to formally making the US a Christian nation, with special Christian protections. Special protections that translate into real political power. Project Blitz is basically the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC) [53] for Christian Nationalists: the group operates as a ‘bill mill’, creating template legislation for widespread use by state legislators. And as we’re going to see, it’s not just that Project Blitz is modeled after ALEC. It’s effectively the same network of conservative powerbrokers behind both networks. That’s why Michael Flynn’s target audience for the ‘one religion under God’ comment wasn’t just Christian conservatives. That target audience included the corporate power brokers best positioned to capitalize and profit from a Christian Nationalist revolution [29]:
Baptist News
If you’re paying attention to Christian nationalism, you won’t be shocked by Michael Flynn’s call for ‘one religion under God’
Opinion Amanda Tyler
November 16, 2021At a rally in San Antonio as part of the “ReAwaken America” tour, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said the quiet part out loud: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God.”
His weekend statement [54] sent shockwaves over social media, but for those of us who have been watching the acceleration of Christian nationalism over the past several years, the admission was hardly surprising. It echoes explicit efforts that would damage our democracy.
Such language, emphasizing non-specific religious language in official settings, is not simply a misguided appeal to patriotism or national unity. Project Blitz, a project of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, explained the rationale behind a model bill for states to mandate the posting of “In God We Trust” in public schools: “More than just a motto, though, it is our country’s foundation and an important part of our identity as Americans.”
Flynn’s longer speech reveals how much he relies on one of the hallmarks of Christian nationalism — the emphasis of a mythical history of the United States as founded as a “Christian nation,” by God’s providential hand that gives our country a special place in history, the present and a premillennialist future. “There is a time, and you have to believe this: that God Almighty is like involved in this country because this is it. This is it. This is the last place on Earth. This is, this is the shining city on the hill,” he said.
The religious reference of “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1950s acknowledges religion as part of our country’s history but certainly does not negate our country’s protections for religious freedom or give the government (much less Michael Flynn) authority to define “the country’s religion.”
One main problem with Flynn’s version of “one nation under God” is that no one religious identity or belief ever has united Americans. The idea of a national religion is directly at odds with the promise of the U.S. Constitution that our government stays neutral when it comes to religion. In Flynn’s United States, many Americans are excluded — those who don’t practice whatever the chosen national faith would be, those who are not monotheistic and those who do not affiliate with religion at all.
...
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“Such language, emphasizing non-specific religious language in official settings, is not simply a misguided appeal to patriotism or national unity. Project Blitz, a project of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, explained the rationale behind a model bill for states to mandate the posting of “In God We Trust” in public schools: “More than just a motto, though, it is our country’s foundation and an important part of our identity as Americans.””
It’s Project Blitz, brought to you by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation. Yes, the group behind Project Blitz has close ties to the US congress. In particular, the Republican delegation in the House of Representatives. Created in 2005 by Republican congressman Randy Forbes, the Congressional Prayer Caucus sounds like a generic non-partisan prayer group for members of congress. And to some extent that’s true. The group is paid for with donations from the office accounts of several congressional members. But as the following 2015 USA Today piece makes clear, it’s basically a Republican operation. That year, the Caucus had 90 House members, and one member in the Senate. Nearly all Republicans.
But Project Blitz isn’t technically a project of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. It’s a project of the Congressional Prayer Caucus’s non-profit organization, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation. Operating out of a building Rep Forbes owns in Chesapeake, VA, the foundation has one paid staff member, executive director Lea Carawan. Carawan sits on the Project Blitz steering committee. Importantly, both Lea and her husband Rolfe are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP) [32].
And as we are going to see, you can’t really separate the extensive planning and efforts that went into overturning the 2020 election results — efforts that started early on in 2020 in anticipation of a Trump electoral loss — from the CNP. This is the larger story here: Project Blitz is just one part of a much larger agenda of capturing and permanently securing political power for the Christian Right, and the organization long at the heart of that agenda is the CNP. The same organization that, as we’ll see, was at the heart of the organizational efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. So while Project Blitz is technically a project of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, it’s important to recognize that the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation is just one of the many entities through which Christian nationalist networks operating at the highest levels of power organize their activities. Project Blitz is a group effort with extensive backing by the right-wing oligarchy [31]:
USA TODAY
Prayer Caucus, funded by taxpayers, defends faith in the public square
Paul Singer
Published 3:57 pm ET Sept 28, 2015 | Updated 4:22 pm ET Sept 28, 2015WASHINGTON — When Pope Francis left the Capitol last week, prayer did not leave with him.
One night a week, the taxpayer-funded congressional Prayer Caucus meets in an ornate room in the U.S. Capitol to defend the role of (mostly) Christian faith and prayer in the U.S. government.
The caucus [55] was created by Rep. Randy Forbes, R‑Va., in 2005, and now includes about 90 members of the House, nearly all Republicans, one U.S. senator and one paid staff member.
“In addition to their commitment to putting aside political differences and uniting in prayer for our nation, members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus work together engaging the legislative process to protect free exercise for Americans of every faith or no faith,” Forbes said in a statement. “Some recent issues Prayer Caucus Members have engaged on include reinforcing religious freedom for all faiths in the military, supporting and protecting the autonomy of churches and faith based organizations, and working to ensure every American is free to live according to their beliefs without fear of punishment by the government.”
...
Like other congressional caucuses, several members kick in shares from their taxpayer-funded office accounts to cover the approximately $50,000 annual salary of the staff member, Amy Vitale, who tracks legislation, drafts letters and generally supports the work of the caucus.
The Prayer Caucus also has an outside non-profit organization [56] that supports its efforts, as are many other caucuses. The Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation operates out of a Chesapeake, Va., building Forbes owns that also houses his campaign office. His wife, Shirley Forbes, is one of three unpaid directors of the foundation. The foundation has one paid staff member, executive director Lea Carawan, but operates entirely on private funds. Carawan declined a request for an interview.
The caucus is partly about prayer. The members gather in the House majority leader’s ceremonial office and pray for the nation and also pray for constituents who are in distress, signing a card of support that is then sent to them..
But the group also aims to extend the reach of faith and prayer in public life.
“We do what we can to make sure that legislation emerges with what we believe to be American, Christian values,” said caucus member John Fleming, R‑La. “We believe that a democracy is only functional if there is a certain level of virtuousness among the nation. Freedom also requires a certain responsibility and that requires a certain moral code. The moral code that we as Americans have lived by for over 200 years is based on what? The Ten Commandments.”
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The foundation encourages individuals to organize “Room 219” prayer groups — named for the room in the U.S. Capitol where the Prayer Caucus meets — and urges the creation of similar caucuses in state legislatures. There are affiliated Prayer Caucuses in at least a dozen state legislatures.
Forbes and a dozen other Prayer Caucus members traveled to North Carolina in March to launch an initiative called PrayUSA, asking government officials and other to sign a resolution calling for prayer. The initiative is part of “a tactical strategy to effectively challenge the growing anti-faith movement in our Country,” the foundation says.
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Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, said “It’s clear that this entity is pushing to merge church and state when it comes to making prayer — particularly Christian prayer — a part of government responsibility.”
The caucus “is trying to use the power of government to be on the side of a particular religious viewpoint,” he argued. “They are trying to give the appearance that certain types of religious activity and certain types of religious belief are endorsed by the government.”
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“The caucus [55] was created by Rep. Randy Forbes, R‑Va., in 2005, and now includes about 90 members of the House, nearly all Republicans, one U.S. senator and one paid staff member.”
A congressional caucus consisting nearly entirely of House Republicans. That was the composition of the Congressional Prayer Caucus in 2015. But it’s not the caucus itself that’s running Project Blitz. That’s done by the caucus’s non-profit foundation, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation. Which has just one paid employee: Executive director — and CNP member [32] — Lea Carawan:
...
Like other congressional caucuses, several members kick in shares from their taxpayer-funded office accounts to cover the approximately $50,000 annual salary of the staff member, Amy Vitale, who tracks legislation, drafts letters and generally supports the work of the caucus.The Prayer Caucus also has an outside non-profit organization [56] that supports its efforts, as are many other caucuses. The Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation operates out of a Chesapeake, Va., building Forbes owns that also houses his campaign office. His wife, Shirley Forbes, is one of three unpaid directors of the foundation. The foundation has one paid staff member, executive director Lea Carawan, but operates entirely on private funds. Carawan declined a request for an interview.
...
Keep in mind that the above article was written in 2015, a year before Project Blitz was formally started. But it was already clear to observers that a merger of church and state was at the of the group’s agenda. Giving certain religious groups special government endorsements was clearly the goal for the Congressional Prayer Caucus and its non-profit Foundation.
Project Blitz: The Christian Right’s Plan to “Make America Great Again” By Making it Officially Christian for the First Time Ever
It was in 2016, with the creation of Project Blitz, that the Congressional Prayer Caucus’s agenda became undeniable. Launched under the leadership of one of the Republican Party’s favorite ‘historians’, David Barton, Project Blitz started off as both a ‘bill mill’ project but also a project in historical revisionism. The kind of historical revisionism that is David Barton’s specialty: revising our understanding of the Founding Fathers. Revising out of American history all of the ugly truths that might damage the Christian nationalist utopian vision of a divinely-guided nation founded by Founding Fathers with deep Christian beliefs and a sense that the United States was intended to be a nation run by and for conservative Christians. As Frederick Clarkson put it, the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to The Handmaid’s Tale. Yes, Project Blitz is essentially an ALEC-like entity that exists to generate the kind of ‘model legislation’ that would remodel the US into The Handmaid’s Tale [34]:
Salon
The plot against America: Inside the Christian right plan to “remodel” the nation
Religious right’s blueprint for theocratic state laws keeps creeping forward. Is the left ready to fight?
By Paul Rosenberg
Published April 13, 2019 12:20PM (EDT)On April 3, USA Today published an array of stories under the banner, “Copy, Paste, Legislate [57],” exploring the political impact of model bills on state-level legislation — more than 10,000 bills from 2010 to 2018 — based on a two-year joint investigation with the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity [58]. The lead story headline said it all: “You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead. [59]”
OK, it wasn’t quite all. While corporate influence was the strongest, figures revealed that conservative groups weren’t far behind: There were 4,301 bills from industry and 4,012 from conservative groups, far more than the 1,602 from liberal groups or the 248 classified as “other.” The hidden origins of these bills often hides their true intent. The most notorious such group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, for instance combines business interests with movement conservatives.
But within the fold of “conservative groups” there’s a whole other story to be told about the organizing of extremist religious conservatives, whose political mobilization, as I’ve noted in the past [60], played a crucial role in electing Donald Trump. Indeed, just the day before “Copy, Past, Legislate” was published, the Texas Senate passed SB-17 [61], a bill that would protect anti-LGBTQ discrimination by all licensed professionals who claim to act on a “sincerely held religious belief.”
“It’s time for Americans to wake up to the harsh reality that the religious right, fueled by their fear of loss of power from the changing demographics in our country and their support from the Trump administration, is emboldened and aggressively pursuing all means possible to maintain white Christian power in America,” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, told Salon. “Project Blitz, for example, has already introduced over 50 bills in at least 23 states this year alone,” she added.
One spin-off story [62] published in the Nashville Tennessean dealt specifically with an anti-LGTBQ adoption model bill. (Simultaneously, NBC reported [63] such bills were “‘snowballing’ in state legislatures.”) The Tennessee bill came from Project Blitz, which was described as “a legislative effort with the stated aim to ‘bring back God to America.’” But as Salon has reported [64] in the past [65], Project Blitz is much more sinister than that.
Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates [66], was the first to discover its three-tier playbook, produced by a coalition of right-wing activists he’d long been following, including Texas Republican activist and pseudo-historian David Barton, whose book, “Jefferson Lies,” which tried to remake Thomas Jefferson as an evangelical hero, was canceled by its publisher [67] under withering criticism from conservative and evangelical scholars (followup here [68])..
“The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of dominionism,” Clarkson told Salon at the time. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming. But they live an immanent theocratic vision.” Not all their allies would go all the way with them, Clarkson told me, but the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to “The Handmaid’s Tale [69]” — reason enough to warrant far more attention than they’ve gotten so far.
The first tier of Project Blitz aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere, the second tier aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America, and the third tier contains three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry.
“Although category three is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions,” Clarkson explained. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.’ ”
The broader findings revealed in “Copy, Paste, Legislate” help to expand our understanding by highlighting three significant patterns shared in various ways with Project Blitz, which are used to advance their theocratic agenda, often hiding it in plain sight:
1) Misleading Language That Inverts Common Sense Project Blitz does this repeatedly with the most fundamental terms: “religious freedom,” “First Amendment,” and so on. In doing so, it mirrors what corporations and insurance companies did with “transparency” in the “Asbestos Transparency Act,” switching the roles of victims and perpetrators, casting themselves as “victims of litigation filed by people harmed by asbestos,” and requiring mesothelioma victims to seek money from an asbestos trust — a lengthy process many won’t live long enough to benefit from. How’s that for “transparency”?
2) Goalpost Moving The entire Project Blitz concept is premised on moving the goalposts. It’s built into the very structure of its three-tiered playbook, as well as the logic of the supporting arguments. A similar strategy was involved in promoting vouchers in Arizona, beginning with a voucher for students with disabilities, then following up with bill after bill offering vouchers to more and more students, eventually all of them, with no guarantee protecting the first group of recipients from getting lost in the process.
“Every single, little expansion, if you look at who’s behind it, it is the people that want to get that door kicked open for private religious education,” the mother of two children on the autism spectrum said. “All we (families with disabled students) are was the way for them to crack open the door.”
3) Pre-emption Project Blitz doesn’t use the term “pre-emption,” but since state-level law routinely pre-empts local laws — which often protect LGBTQ rights, for example — it’s implicitly integral to their strategy. Model bills tracked by USA Today often focused on such pre-emption:
These laws, in effect, allow state legislators to dictate to city councils and county governing boards what they can and cannot do within their jurisdiction — including preventing them from raising the minimum wage, banning plastic grocery bags, and destroying guns.
North Carolina’s notorious bathroom bill [70] was an example of the kind of bill that Project Blitz could take up in the future, and politicians associated with Project Blitz have already copied it — most notably, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick [71], whose efforts last session ultimately failed [72]. Last month, Texas was at it again, when an ALEC-inspired effort to pre-empt local worker protections was hijacked by Patrick allies [73] to pre-empt LBGTQ protections as well.
With these patterns in mind, let’s first consider how the religious right has attempted to reinvent bigotry as freedom, and then take a look at contemporary state battles in Texas and elsewhere.
Bigot’s Rights: Theocracy’s Foundation
As I noted here in 2016 [74], this new homophobic discriminatory vision exactly echoes the racist discriminatory vision that birthed the religious right in the 1970s. The connection is transparently obvious. When Mississippi passed a “religious freedom” law [75] that year, which only protected the freedom of bigots, the Jackson city council unanimously passed a resolution rebuking the law [76], and Mayor Tony Yarber explicitly connected bigotry past and present:
As a predominantly black city in Mississippi, the Jackson community has endured racism, discrimination and injustice over the years. We are Mississippi’s capital city, and as part of our declaration of being the “Bold New City,” we will not discriminate against any individual because of race, religious beliefs or sexual orientation, nor do we support legislation that allows for such discrimination.
The battleground Project Blitz has chosen revolves around a falsified history of America as a “Christian nation” — sharply at odds with “The Godless Constitution [77]” we actually have — and a newly-minted definition of “Christianity” as rooted in homophobia. With these twin lies in place, they position themselves as the “true Christians” and “true Americans” suffering from government oppression.
With that false social identity in place, Christian nationalists rationalize the “freedom” to discriminate as a fundamental right, powering a shift from defense to offense, that was perfectly captured by Katherine Stewart in a New York Times op-ed last year, “A Christian Nationalist Blitz [78].” Stewart described participants in a Project Blitz conference call referring to the above law “in awed tones as ‘the Mississippi missile.’” To understand why, here’s its exact language [75]:
SECTION 2. The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:
(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
© Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.
In Project Blitz’s 2018–19 playbook [79], this is called the “Marriage Tolerance Act” (aka “First Amendment Defense Act”) and uses the same narrowly-tailored definition. But if “legislators do not have enough support to pass the recommended language,” the playbook offers “a fall-back position,” replacing the explicit language with the vaguely-worded alternative, “regarding lawful marriage in this state.”
This is not advised, however, because of the danger that it will be used by non-bigots. The playbook explains:
We repeat, however, that we advise against this alternative. This language still carries a risk, even if slim, of being abused by an individual or group alleging that their same-sex marriage views are a “sincerely held religious belief.”
Such is the mindset behind the façade of promoting American freedom.
Battlefield Texas
In Texas, as noted above, a Project Blitz bill, SB-17, just passed the State Senate [61]. It would allow anti-LGBTQ discrimination by any licensed professional. (Technically, such a professional could still be sued for discrimination, but could rely on the law at trial.) In rural Texas, this could easily mean a total lack of services. It’s not just health care professionals who could wantonly hold people’s lives in their hands. If passed, an LGBTQ Texan could well die of heatstroke because of an air-conditioning repair person’s “sincerely held religious belief,” as pointed out by Emmett Schelling, executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, in an April 8 press conference call.
“Life as a trans person in Texas is already very difficult,” Schelling said. “Enacting this law would make it even more difficult ... if not impossible, for those of us marginalized within our community.”
“The last legislative session, most of the oxygen was taken up with epic battles over a bathroom bill,” added Samantha Smoot, interim executive director of Equality Texas, on the same call. That push was led by Lt. Gov. Patrick [71], whose efforts ultimately failed [72]. The election that followed was widely seen as “in large part a referendum on the bathroom bill,” Smoot said. “Twelve new pro-equality legislators were elected here in Texas; four of the top proponents of the bathroom bill were defeated,” she said. “That led us to the beginning of the session, and the lieutenant governor stating publicly that this is going to be a meat-and-potatoes session, that we’re not going to see the types of attacks on LGBTQ people that had characterized the 2017 legislative session.”
Now, in a stark turnaround, SB-17 has renewed the battle, already drawing strong business opposition [80], in fears of repeating North Carolina’s experience. It isn’t alone. “SB 17 is one of 15 bills that have been filed this session that aim to turn religion into a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people in Texas,” Smoot said.
On the same call, Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, discussed the influence of David Barton and Project Blitz. “It now seems clear that Texas is at the center of the nationwide state-by-state strategy to pass legislation that uses religion to block or roll back nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ Texans and LGBTQ Americans,” Miller said. “Make no mistake, what is happening in Texas now will happen in other states as well. In fact, it already has.”
“What’s extraordinary about the Texas bill is its reach,” Clarkson said after the call. We’ve been used to adoption agency bills, for example, he noted, “But this has to do with all state professional licensing agencies. So if you’re a social worker or teacher, as well as a health care worker, you can declare religious exemptions in service to LGBTQ people on a range that’s breathtaking,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve seen that anywhere else.”
What could this portend? “It suggests we’re on a slippery slope, just in terms of the nature and the range of religious exemptions and how broadly they can apply,” Clarkson said. “It’s accelerating and expanding in a way we have not seen elsewhere. Everybody should be rightly concerned about the unambiguous dominionist intentions of Project Blitz generally, and of many of the backers of legislation like this.”
On the other hand, some people’s willingness to go along is limited or conditional, and political circumstances certainly can change —and have done so, as witness the midterm election results.
“On the plus side of this, for 2020, I think that the recent round of elections showed what’s possible,” Clarkson noted. “That shows that there is a vast swath of Americans that, if they decide to act, can make a decisive difference in situations like this.”
To better understand David Barton’s role in particular, I turned to Chris Rodda, author of “Liars for Jesus” [81] and senior research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation [82]. On the one hand, as an activist, she noted, “Barton has for years encouraged his followers to run for local and state office, from school boards on up, and pushed the importance of local of state and local elections to get the voter turnout.” This local election focus is where evangelical conservatives consistently have an edge over Democrats, she noted.
Barton’s fake version of history is directly connected to political outcomes, Rodda said. “The reason for the history revisionism is to make the followers of people like Barton think that the religious legislation is justified by history,” Rodda said. “Since most Christians aren’t liars, he has to get them to genuinely believe that the legislation that they’re trying to get passed is what the founders intended,” when it’s actually the exact opposite, as I’ve noted repeatedly before (here [74], here [83] and here [84]).
The Power of Lies
As noted above, the twin lies that America was founded as a Christian nation and that Christianity is defined by homophobia combine to create a powerful social identity, which in turn helps facilitate the spread of Project Blitz’s agenda, whether precisely embodied in model bills or not.
This can be seen in two related stories from Missouri. First, Madison McVan at the Missourian reported on a trio of bills [85] whose intent aligns with Project Blitz — Missouri House Bill 267 [86], whose text resembles the “Bible Literacy Act,” a Senate resolution [87] encouraging schools to offer Bible literacy electives (similar in spirit only), and House Bill 577 [88], which is much shorter than the “National Motto Display Act” from Project Blitz, but with the same end result: “The bill would require public schools to display ‘In God We Trust’ in a prominent location such as a school entryway or cafeteria.”
None of the authors claimed to know about Project Blitz, but its influence was obvious. The textually similar bill came from copying other state laws. Another was written by the chair of the Missouri Prayer Caucus Network, whose national foundation helped creation the Project Blitz handbook. He claimed to have had no involvement. The third author could not remember where the text came from — only that someone had offered it and he liked it.
“Even if some legislators introduce bills that they do not know draws language from Project Blitz model bills, it certainly validates Project Blitz methods, which get their material circulated, even if indirectly from other states that may use it more overtly,” Clarkson said. “Similarly, just because someone is not a member of a state’s legislative prayer caucus doesn’t mean that they are not influenced by those who are.”
In short, the impacts of Project Blitz go well beyond what the textual analysis behind “Cut, Paste, Legislate” can measure.
The role of shaping a social identity is especially noteworthy in the second Missouri story, from the Missouri Times [89]. It concerns House Bill 728 [90], which would prohibit anonymous freedom of religion lawsuits — which are allowed under current law, if the person bringing the lawsuit can show cause. “The Missouri bill that prohibits church-state plaintiffs from being anonymous despite, or perhaps because of, the likelihood that these plaintiffs are harassed and even receive death threats is another example of how emboldened and immoral the religious right is today,” said Laser of Americans United.
But the bill’s author, Rep. Hardy Billington, continued to play the victim. “House Bill 728 would guarantee that no individual or organization will be able to use state courts as a weapon to attack the right of Missouri citizens to display religious symbols in public spaces while hiding behind a cloak of secrecy,” he said.
Of course that “right” only exists in Barton’s mythical history. But myths have tremendous power in Trump’s post-truth America. Which is why political leaders need to step up, Laser argued.
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“The first tier of Project Blitz aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere, the second tier aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America, and the third tier contains three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry.”
A three-tiered plan, with each tier getting us closer and closer to a full blown theocracy. The first tier gets the theocratic foot in the door with seemingly innocuous calls for prayer in public schools and the public sphere. The second tier pushes this agenda a bit further by getting the government to make proclamations about how the US society was built on Christian foundations. Like the first tier, it’s just a seemingly innocuous declaration of particular religious traditions. But then we get to the third tier of the agenda, where particular religious beliefs are then declared “protected” by law. As Frederick Clarkson put it, the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to The Handmaid’s Tale. Project Blitz was set up to feed lawmakers cookie-cutter legislation designed to further that agenda. That’s the game being played here, which is why secrecy about the very existence of Project Blitz has also been part of the agenda too.
But it’s not just an agenda for conferring special rights to conservative Christians. Project Blitz has the goal of imposing an ahistorical version of American history. Specifically, David Barton’s ahistorical vision of the Founding Fathers as ardent Christian nationalists who actually sought a merger of Church and State:
...
“It’s time for Americans to wake up to the harsh reality that the religious right, fueled by their fear of loss of power from the changing demographics in our country and their support from the Trump administration, is emboldened and aggressively pursuing all means possible to maintain white Christian power in America,” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, told Salon. “Project Blitz, for example, has already introduced over 50 bills in at least 23 states this year alone,” she added.One spin-off story [62] published in the Nashville Tennessean dealt specifically with an anti-LGTBQ adoption model bill. (Simultaneously, NBC reported [63] such bills were “‘snowballing’ in state legislatures.”) The Tennessee bill came from Project Blitz, which was described as “a legislative effort with the stated aim to ‘bring back God to America.’” But as Salon has reported [64] in the past [65], Project Blitz is much more sinister than that.
Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates [66], was the first to discover its three-tier playbook, produced by a coalition of right-wing activists he’d long been following, including Texas Republican activist and pseudo-historian David Barton, whose book, “Jefferson Lies,” which tried to remake Thomas Jefferson as an evangelical hero, was canceled by its publisher [67] under withering criticism from conservative and evangelical scholars (followup here [68])..
“The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of dominionism,” Clarkson told Salon at the time. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming. But they live an immanent theocratic vision.” Not all their allies would go all the way with them, Clarkson told me, but the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to “The Handmaid’s Tale [69]” — reason enough to warrant far more attention than they’ve gotten so far.
...
The battleground Project Blitz has chosen revolves around a falsified history of America as a “Christian nation” — sharply at odds with “The Godless Constitution [77]” we actually have — and a newly-minted definition of “Christianity” as rooted in homophobia. With these twin lies in place, they position themselves as the “true Christians” and “true Americans” suffering from government oppression.
...
Barton’s fake version of history is directly connected to political outcomes, Rodda said. “The reason for the history revisionism is to make the followers of people like Barton think that the religious legislation is justified by history,” Rodda said. “Since most Christians aren’t liars, he has to get them to genuinely believe that the legislation that they’re trying to get passed is what the founders intended,” when it’s actually the exact opposite, as I’ve noted repeatedly before (here [74], here [83] and here [84]).
...
So is David Barton just a religious con man who has achieved a disturbing level of influence? Yes and no.
David Barton: The GOP’s Go-To Theocrat
Yes, David Barton is indeed a religious con man. But he’s not just some random con man. A adherent of the “Seven Mountains Dominionism” sect, Barton has for decades been one of the most revered con men in the Republican Party. He was so popular back in 2011 that Mike Huckabee introduced Barton at an event by declaring, “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it.” But as the following 2012 Daily Beast excerpt points out, Barton’s relationship with the religious right hasn’t always been smooth. That was the year Barton faced a backlash. Someone finally noticed that Barton’s version of American history was a steaming pile of ahistorical garbage. Not that it mattered in the end. The backlash didn’t last. And that’s part of the story here: David Barton operates in such bad faith that he was called out by fellow conservative Christian historians about a decade ago, and yet Barton continues to be a key figure on the Religious Right, with Project Blitz as just one of his many theocratic projects. Barton was outed as a fraud and it didn’t matter because it was politically convenient fraud [36]:
The Daily Beast
David Barton, Christian Scholar, Faces a Backlash
‘Misleading Claims’The far-right author has claimed the founding fathers wanted a Christian nation—but now conservatives are disowning his work.
Michelle Goldberg
Updated Jul. 13, 2017 10:26PM ET
Published Aug. 11, 2012 4:45AM ETAt the Rediscovering God in America conference in 2011, Mike Huckabee gave an impassioned introduction to David Barton, the religious right’s favorite revisionist historian. “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message,” he said. “And I think our country would be better for it.”
It’s hard to overstate how important Barton has been in shaping the worldview of the Christian right, and of populist conservatives more generally. A self-taught historian with a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, he runs a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders, which specializes in books and videos meant to show that the founding fathers were overwhelmingly “orthodox, evangelical” believers who intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. Newt Gingrich has called his work “wonderful” and “most useful.” George W. Bush’s campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004. In 2010, Glenn Beck called him [91] called him [92] “the most important man in America right now.” At the end of the month, he’s slated to serve on the GOP’s platform committee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
But now, suddenly, Barton’s reputation is in freefall, and not just among the secular historians and journalists who have been denouncing him for ages. (I’m among them; I wrote extensively about Barton in my 2006 book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [93].) Earlier this week, the evangelical World magazine published a piece [94] about the growing number of conservative Christian scholars questioning his work. Then, on Thursday, Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, recalled Barton’s most recent book [95], the bestselling The Jefferson Lies, saying it had “lost confidence in the book’s details.”
For decades, Barton has tried to write enlightenment deism out of American history, but it seems that by attempting to turn the famously freethinking Thomas Jefferson into a pious precursor of the modern Christian right, he finally went too far. “Books like that makes Christian scholarship look bad,” says Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical professor of psychology at Grove City College, a conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania. “If that’s what people are passing off as Christian scholarship, there are claims in there that are easily proved false.”
Throckmorton and another Grove City professor, Michael Coulter, have been so disturbed by Barton’s distortions that they wrote a recent rejoinder to his Jefferson book, titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President [96]. Their book appears to have inspired other conservative Christians finally to take a critical look at Barton.
Jay Richards, a senior fellow at the conservative Discovery Institute who spoke alongside Barton at a conference last month, read Getting Jefferson Right and got in touch with Throckmorton. According to World, Richards proceeded to ask 10 conservative Christian scholars to review Barton’s work. When they did, the response was extremely negative, leading Richards to conclude that Barton’s books and videos trafficked in “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”
The most serious of Barton’s deceptions involve his efforts to whitewash Jefferson’s racism, part of Barton’s broader project of absolving the founders of the original sin of slavery, which would taint his picture of the country’s divine origins. His book argues, falsely, that Jefferson wanted to free his slaves, but couldn’t do so because of Virginia law. That claim so incensed some Cincinnati-area pastors, both African-American and white, that they threatened a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishers. “You can’t be serious about racial unity in the church, while holding up Jefferson as a hero and champion of freedom,” one of them said in a press release.
Barton’s history around race is complicated. As I’ve previously written, he got his start on the racist far right. In 1991, the Anti-Defamation League has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a Christian Identity group. A fringe creed, Christian Identity [97] holds that Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, while Africans are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. That fall, Barton was featured at another Christianity Identity gathering, in Oregon.
As Barton went mainstream, however, he distanced himself from outright racism. Instead, he’s sought to prove that liberals have exaggerated the scale of black oppression in early America, and to paint contemporary Republicans as the champions of African-American freedom. In one document on the WallBuilders website, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s 1964 break with the Democrats to the senator’s “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation rather than civil rights.
...
———–
“It’s hard to overstate how important Barton has been in shaping the worldview of the Christian right, and of populist conservatives more generally. A self-taught historian with a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, he runs a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders, which specializes in books and videos meant to show that the founding fathers were overwhelmingly “orthodox, evangelical” believers who intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. Newt Gingrich has called his work “wonderful” and “most useful.” George W. Bush’s campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004. In 2010, Glenn Beck called him [91] called him [92] “the most important man in America right now.” At the end of the month, he’s slated to serve on the GOP’s platform committee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.”
Yes, it truly is hard to overstate how important David Barton has been in shaping the worldview of the Christian right. When Glenn Beck called Barton “the most important man in America right now”, this was after decades of Barton’s ascendance as the philosophical leader of the movement. A movement dedicated to the erosion of the Separation of Church and State. David Barton’s personal quest to redefine the US’s own sense of history, and ‘prove’ that the Founding Fathers never truly intended to keep church and state separate, had grown into a movement that had already captured the hearts and minds of much of the Republican base. David Barton was arguably the political guiding light for the US Christian right throughout the 90’s and 2000’s.
And then, suddenly in 2012, it seemed like Barton’s star might be dimming. Decades after embracing him, a number of conservative historians appeared to suddenly discover that Barton’s historical scholarship was rather lacking. Lacking in the sense of being grossly fraudulent. A dam of lies was finally breaking. Or at least that’s how it seemed at the time:
...
But now, suddenly, Barton’s reputation is in freefall, and not just among the secular historians and journalists who have been denouncing him for ages. (I’m among them; I wrote extensively about Barton in my 2006 book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [93].) Earlier this week, the evangelical World magazine published a piece [94] about the growing number of conservative Christian scholars questioning his work. Then, on Thursday, Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, recalled Barton’s most recent book [95], the bestselling The Jefferson Lies, saying it had “lost confidence in the book’s details.”For decades, Barton has tried to write enlightenment deism out of American history, but it seems that by attempting to turn the famously freethinking Thomas Jefferson into a pious precursor of the modern Christian right, he finally went too far. “Books like that makes Christian scholarship look bad,” says Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical professor of psychology at Grove City College, a conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania. “If that’s what people are passing off as Christian scholarship, there are claims in there that are easily proved false.”
Throckmorton and another Grove City professor, Michael Coulter, have been so disturbed by Barton’s distortions that they wrote a recent rejoinder to his Jefferson book, titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President [96]. Their book appears to have inspired other conservative Christians finally to take a critical look at Barton.
...
The most serious of Barton’s deceptions involve his efforts to whitewash Jefferson’s racism, part of Barton’s broader project of absolving the founders of the original sin of slavery, which would taint his picture of the country’s divine origins. His book argues, falsely, that Jefferson wanted to free his slaves, but couldn’t do so because of Virginia law. That claim so incensed some Cincinnati-area pastors, both African-American and white, that they threatened a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishers. “You can’t be serious about racial unity in the church, while holding up Jefferson as a hero and champion of freedom,” one of them said in a press release.
...
And note how it’s not as if there hadn’t been warning signs about Barton’s intellectual integrity for years. Barton got his start on the far right. He addressed the Christian Identity movement’s Rocky Mountain Bible Retreat of Pastor Pete Peters’ Scriptures for America back in 1991, and then proceeded to build a ‘mainstream’ career as a religious historian who sought to prove that liberals exaggerated the scale of black oppression in early America. The warnings signs were there well before he was embraced by the mainstream conservative movement as some sort of genuine scholar:
...
Barton’s history around race is complicated. As I’ve previously written, he got his start on the racist far right. In 1991, the Anti-Defamation League has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a Christian Identity group. A fringe creed, Christian Identity [97] holds that Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, while Africans are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. That fall, Barton was featured at another Christianity Identity gathering, in Oregon.As Barton went mainstream, however, he distanced himself from outright racism. Instead, he’s sought to prove that liberals have exaggerated the scale of black oppression in early America, and to paint contemporary Republicans as the champions of African-American freedom. In one document on the WallBuilders website, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s 1964 break with the Democrats to the senator’s “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation rather than civil rights.
...
The guy got his start in the Christian Identity movement and went mainstream from there. It’s a truly disturbing career path. And as the following 2011 SPLC profile of Barton makes clear, Barton isn’t just a theocrat. He’s specifically a Seven Mountains Dominionism theocrat. The kind of theocrat who incorporates a divine mandate to seize political power into their theology. And the kind of theocrat whose theology just happens to align with the whims of large corporations. The kind of theocrat who claims Jesus and the Bible oppose minimum wage laws, unions, and protecting the environment. In other words, David Barton was the perfect Republican theocrat, so it’s no wonder the party was willing to look past his ahistorical shortcomings [38]:
Southern Poverty Law Center
David Barton – Extremist ‘Historian’ for the Christian Right
Evelyn Schlatter
May 05, 2011The New York Times today published an article [98] about David Barton, a self-educated, pseudo-historian who advises several prominent right-wing political figures, including Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. Huckabee, in fact, recently said at a religious-right conference that he wished all Americans could be “forced — forced at gunpoint no less — to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it.”
Named by Time as one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical Christians in 2005, Barton is best known for peddling historical distortions promoting his view that America was founded as a Christian, rather than secular, nation. He served as vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006, and he was hired in 2004 by the Republican National Committee to mobilize Christians for President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Since then, he has also become Glenn Beck’s unofficial “historian” (Barton and Beck below, recently in Israel).
Times reporter Erik Eckholm noted that Barton “has steadily built a reputation as a guiding spirit of the religious right” even as many historians say he relies on flawed research. What the article didn’t reveal is the depth of Barton’s extremism.
Last month, People for the American Way released a report [99] examining Barton’s role in the religious right and Republican politics. Barton, who often promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding “the truth” from average Americans, subscribes to beliefs found in Seven Mountains Dominionism [100]. This movement teaches that certain kinds of Christians are meant by God to dominate every sphere of society.
Barton has warned about the dangers of Islam but claimed that “secularism presents a greater threat to American traditions and values than does Islam” and that the Constitution was not meant to be a secular document. He has battled marriage equality and has campaigned for state restrictions on legal equality for LGBT people. He has involved himself in the new war on unions, claiming that Jesus and the Bible oppose minimum wage laws.
He has also been extremely active in the religious right’s campaign against so-called “activist judges.” His 2003 book Restraining Judicial Activism calls for the impeachment of federal judges who don’t interpret the Constitution the way he does. In addition, he says, members of Congress should use the threat of impeachment to intimidate federal judges.
Here are some other notable Barton activities:
* His 2006 DVD, Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White [101] is a 90-minute effort to paint the Democratic Party as responsible for problems faced by African Americans, saying that Democrats “bamboozled blacks.” He conveniently leaves out history after 1965 and the rise of the racist “Southern Strategy” within the Republican Party.
* In 2007, Barton wrote an article critical of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison — the first Muslim sworn into Congress — in which he touted the works of Robert Spencer, a right-wing author of virulently anti-Muslim books. Spencer, along with Pam Geller [102], founded the vitriolic group Stop the Islamization of America, which is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. In 2010, Barton devoted several of his WallBuilders Live radio broadcasts to critics of the Park51 Project (incorrectly called the “Ground Zero Mosque” by opponents). One of the guests was Walid Shoebat, who calls himself a former PLO terrorist who converted to Christianity. On the show, Shoebat said that the imam leading the Park51 project was trying to implement Shariah law on America and that “liberals always agree with Muslims.” Barton agreed.
* Barton is closely associated with a movement among conservative evangelicals to resist environmental activism in churches and to paint environmentalism as actively anti-Christian. In 2009, he signed the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which claims that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide would be economically devastating and are therefore against Biblical requirements of “protecting the poor from harm and oppression.” He is active with “Resisting the Green Dragon,” a project that portrays environmentalism as “deadly” to human prosperity, human life and human freedom.
* Barton has argued against immigration reform, and claimed that God established the borders of nations. He has hosted the viciously anti-immigrant William Gheen of ALIPAC [103] on his radio show. Gheen garnered national attention in the spring of 2010 when he demanded that U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R‑S.C.) come out as gay. His refusal to do so, Gheen claimed, allowed President Obama and others to blackmail him into supporting immigration reform.
* In 2010, Barton was influential in the battle to re-design the Texas state social studies curriculum in public schools to have it conform more closely to a right-wing view of America. Barton supported efforts to remove Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 1960s labor activist César Chávez from school texts. As noted [99] in Washington Monthly, Barton conceded that people like King deserved a place in history but insisted they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities, because, as he put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in American’s constitutional society.” Barton’s involvement with the textbook controversy also demonstrated the partisanship behind much of his work. He claimed that since the founders “hated and feared democracy” — and created a republic instead — textbooks should refer to “republican values” rather than “democratic” ones.
* Barton also believes the government should regulate homosexuality [104], claiming in one of his radio shows in 2010 that “homosexuals die decades earlier than heterosexuals” and that more than half of all homosexuals have had more than 500 sex partners in their lifetimes. The claims are false [105].
* Barton’s early activism put him in contact with even more extreme elements. In 1991, according to a 1996 article by Rob Boston [106], he addressed the Rocky Mountain Bible Retreat of Pastor Pete Peters’ Scriptures for America. Peters promotes the racist and anti-Semitic “Christian Identity” theology, which claims that white Anglo-Saxons are the “true” chosen people of the Bible. According to the Anti-Defamation League, other speakers at that event included James “Bo” Gritz, a leader of the antigovernment militia movement, and Malcolm Ross, a Holocaust denier from Canada. Later that year, Barton addressed another Christian Identity front group — the Kingdom Covenant College in Grants Pass, Oregon, which had ties to Peters. Barton’s assistant at the time, Kit Marshall, claimed they had no idea about Peters’ beliefs, even though Barton addressed the groups twice during the course of a year.
...
————
“Last month, People for the American Way released a report [99] examining Barton’s role in the religious right and Republican politics. Barton, who often promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding “the truth” from average Americans, subscribes to beliefs found in Seven Mountains Dominionism [100]. This movement teaches that certain kinds of Christians are meant by God to dominate every sphere of society.”
It’s not just a theocracy they’re trying to build. It’s a Dominionist Theocracy along the lines of ‘Seven Mountains’ Dominionism. Recall how Donald Trump’s closest ‘spiritual advisor’ during his presidency was Paula White, a following of the Seven Mountains theology. Trump selected her as chair of his Evangelical Advisory Board and appointed her as special advisor to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Other Seven Mountain evangelical leaders have effectively tied the theology into the QAnon narrative, a narrative that puts Trump at the center of a battle between good and evil [23]. And while the Seven Mountains doctrine my sound like some obscure cult to outsiders, the reality is that David Barton has been one of the most influential and revered Christian leaders inside the Republican Party for decades. And it’s no surprise why. Barton’s version of Christianity is a GOP oligarch’s dream, with declarations like unions and minimum wage laws being in opposition to the Bible:
...
Named by Time as one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical Christians in 2005, Barton is best known for peddling historical distortions promoting his view that America was founded as a Christian, rather than secular, nation. He served as vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006, and he was hired in 2004 by the Republican National Committee to mobilize Christians for President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Since then, he has also become Glenn Beck’s unofficial “historian” (Barton and Beck below, recently in Israel)....
Barton has warned about the dangers of Islam but claimed that “secularism presents a greater threat to American traditions and values than does Islam” and that the Constitution was not meant to be a secular document. He has battled marriage equality and has campaigned for state restrictions on legal equality for LGBT people. He has involved himself in the new war on unions, claiming that Jesus and the Bible oppose minimum wage laws.
He has also been extremely active in the religious right’s campaign against so-called “activist judges.” His 2003 book Restraining Judicial Activism calls for the impeachment of federal judges who don’t interpret the Constitution the way he does. In addition, he says, members of Congress should use the threat of impeachment to intimidate federal judges.
...
* Barton is closely associated with a movement among conservative evangelicals to resist environmental activism in churches and to paint environmentalism as actively anti-Christian. In 2009, he signed the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which claims that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide would be economically devastating and are therefore against Biblical requirements of “protecting the poor from harm and oppression.” He is active with “Resisting the Green Dragon,” a project that portrays environmentalism as “deadly” to human prosperity, human life and human freedom.
...
It’s not hard to see what the backlash Barton experienced in 2012 ended up being little more than a slap on the wrist. Barton is like the living manifestation of fusion of hard right Christian theology with corporate interests. He’ll literally rewrite history to benefit those interests.
David Barton’s Constitutional Overhaul. Which Happens to be the Koch’s Constitutional Overhaul
And as the following 2019 piece from The Center for Media and Democracy describes, Barton doesn’t just work on rewriting American history for the benefit of powerful interests. It turns out WallBuilders group is one of the partners with the Koch-backed Convention of States (COS) effort to overhaul the US constitution. As we’ve seen, the Koch network of mega-donors has spent decades investing in triggering an Article V Constitutional Convention, threatening to rewrite the constitution according to the whims of the Koch mega-donor network [15]. WallBuilders is part of that effort. Because of course it is. This is entirely consistent with David Barton’s work [40]:
The Center for Media and Democracy’s PRWatch
Convention of States Fires Up Base for Push to Rewrite U.S. Constitution
Submitted by David Armiak on August 23, 2019 — 1:37pm
Convention of States Action (COS) kicked off its first “Leadership Summit [107]” in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia today. COS [108], a project of Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe’s Citizens for Self-Governance [109], claims that “hundreds” of activists, state directors, and coordinators from all 50 states will attend to get inspired and learn strategies for passing COS resolutions in the states calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.
Fifteen states have passed the group’s applications so far, with 17 more states considering the resolution this year, according to COS. Wisconsin recently introduced a COS resolution [110], which would bump the number up to 18.
A constitutional convention has never been held since the Constitution was adopted, and COS will need 34 states to file applications in order for it to occur. If that happens, COS plans to move an array of sweeping amendments to redefine key parts of the Constitution and radically weaken the federal government.
COS has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council [53] (ALEC), the National Rifle Association, the right-wing militia group Three Percenters, and the Christian nationalist group WallBuilders [111].
More than 200 civil rights and public interest groups, including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), signed a letter [112] last year denouncing such constitutional convention calls as “a threat to every American’s constitutional rights and civil liberties.”
Right-Wing Extremists to Speak
Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, from Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends, addressed the crowd this morning, telling them that the Left hates the Constitution, the founding fathers understood that the word of “Jesus Christ our savior” is the guiding force for our country, and that there “is no other freedom-loving bastion in the world that values the individual with God-endowed rights.”
And, referencing the Three Percenters likely in attendance, Hegseth said, “it has always been the one percent or two percent or three percent of people that get it, that are willing to buck the comfiness of their moment and the established norms that everyone is comfortable with, willing to be defiant, willing to stand — be accused of being radical about things that are not radical at all.”
Recently, Hegseth has made some radical comments himself, saying that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI‑D) has a “Hamas agenda [113],” implying that she works with a U.S. designated terrorist organization.
Hegseth has also publicly defended [114] Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince’s Blackwater contractors, who were convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens, and has called [115] climate change a “religion” that Democrats use to “control” people.
David Barton warmed up the crowd with a history lecture on the Constitution’s basis in fixed moral standards based on natural law and scripture, and drew applause with his claim that the federal government has “emasculated the states.”
A Christian nationalist with strong anti-LGBT views. Barton once said [116],
“There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1. ... [I]t talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. ... The Bible [is] right every time ... and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for. ... And that goes to what God says, ‘Hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.’ ”
Barton founded the group WallBuilders, which has worked with Focus on the Family [117] and the Family Policy Alliance [118] to influence judicial elections and selection rules in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed [119].
WallBuilders also works with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to push out Christian-Right model legislation in the mold of ALEC to state lawmakers under the name Project Blitz [120].
Also in line to speak at the Summit is one of the NRA’s top attorneys, Charles Cooper. Cooper will speak on, “The Real Threat to Gun Rights.” In an email to COS activists, Cooper is quoted as saying:
“The real threat to our constitutional rights today is posed not by an Article V Convention of States, but by an out-of-control federal government, exercising powers that it does not have and abusing powers that it does.”
COS materials in recent years have argued that a constitutional convention could be used to rewrite the Second Amendment in order to make it Supreme-Court-proof.
Others on the agenda to speak include founding board member Eric O’Keefe [121], former professor Rob Natelson [122], former U.S. Senator and COS Senior Advisor Tom Coburn, and the right-wing author of Liberty Amendments Mark Levin.
But the stars of the summit are likely to be the actors COS will have play the founding fathers Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington.
...
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“David Barton warmed up the crowd with a history lecture on the Constitution’s basis in fixed moral standards based on natural law and scripture, and drew applause with his claim that the federal government has “emasculated the states.””
The COS is a shared project of the right-wing oligarchy. It’s arguably their end goal. So of course we find David Barton’s WallBuilders involved with the movement. Overhauling the constitution aligns perfectly with both his theocratic and pro-business agendas:
...
Barton founded the group WallBuilders, which has worked with Focus on the Family [117] and the Family Policy Alliance [118] to influence judicial elections and selection rules in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed [119].WallBuilders also works with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to push out Christian-Right model legislation in the mold of ALEC to state lawmakers under the name Project Blitz [120].
...
And note that, while the COS is technically a project of Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe’s Citizens for Self-Governance, it’s really a Koch-backed project [109]. That’s why this group is able to get so many state legislators to buy into this effort. This is a project of the oligarchy.
The Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Capture of the US Government
And as we’re going to see in the next article excerpt, it turns out Meckler is and Gold Circle member of another group: the Council for National Policy. Barton is a member too [32]. Along with a large number of the rest of the figures in the conservative establishment who played important roles in the Trump 2020 reelection efforts. And in some cases key roles in the preparation for the theft of the 2020 election. For example, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway both show up on CNP membership lists [9].
The fact that the CNP had its hands all over the efforts to reelect Trump isn’t particularly surprising or remarkable. What is remarkable is how extensively the CNP was planning on overturning the popular vote and stealing the election months before the first votes were cast. CNP members Richard Viguerie, Stephen Moore, Jenny Beth Martin, Adam Brandon, and Lisa Nelson, the CEO of ALEC, were all involved in CNP-backed efforts to get Trump reelected in 2020. Dirty efforts. For example, Nelson reportedly informed the CNP in February of 2020 that ALEC was working with Republican lawyers to strategize paths “that legislators can take to question the validity of an election.” [17] And one of those Republican lawyers was none other than CNP-member Cleta Mitchell, who began strategizing in preparation for questioning the 2020 election results as early as August 2019 [14].
And, again, while Project Blitz is not technically a CNP project, it’s basically the same network of people behind it. The CNP is the entity through with Christian theocrats and big business interests formalized their long-standing alliance in American politics. A fascist theocratic alliance that heavily overlaps the Koch network. From ALEC to COS to Project Blitz, all of these entities are operated by roughly the same networks of people and for the same underlying purpose: the capture of power by private interests. Projects like COS and Project Blitz could be seen as cover-stories for that capture of power. And as this network made abundantly clear in 2020, that agenda of capturing power includes overturning the election results. The capture of democracy was on the CNP agenda throughout 2020, leading all the way up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection [42]:
The Washington Spectator
How the CNP, a Republican Powerhouse, Helped Spawn Trumpism, Disrupted the Transfer of Power, and Stoked the Assault on the Capitol
by Anne Nelson
Feb 22, 2021On January 6, 2021, a stunned nation watched as protesters stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of the electoral votes from the November election. The effort failed, but not without shining a harsh light on the fault lines of American democracy.
In the weeks that followed, analysts have struggled to define how much of the incursion was the spontaneous result of a “riot”—or a “peaceful protest” gone wrong—and how much was the result of a planned operation.
One major player in the events leading up to the assault on the Capitol was the Council for National Policy, an influential coalition of Christian conservatives, free-market fundamentalists, and political activists. Over the previous year the CNP and its members and affiliates organized efforts to challenge the validity of the election, conspired to overturn its results, and tried to derail the orderly transfer of power. This is an account of the measures they took, leading up to the deadly January 6 insurrection.
The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year. From the beginning, its goals represented a convergence of the interests of these three groups: a retreat from advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and raw political power. Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP. Favorite sons, such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were groomed, financed, and supported. Apostates, such as John McCain and Jeff Flake, were punished and exiled. The leaders of the CNP tended to favor their conservative Christian co-religionists, but political expedience came first.
In 2016, the CNP put its partners’ money, data, and ground game behind Donald Trump, as the ultimate transactional candidate. Trump promised it retrograde social policies, a favorable tax regime, regulatory retreats, and its choice of federal judges. He delivered in spades. By 2020, the leaders of the CNP were ready to go to extreme lengths to keep him—and themselves—in power.
Over the final year of the Trump presidency, the CNP took center stage. By January 2020, its leading figures had become sought-after guests on talk shows and frequent visitors to the White House. Many of its stated goals had been advanced. By March, the Republican Senate had confirmed more than 185 of Trump’s conservative nominees for the federal bench. All but eight of the judges had ties to the Federalist Society, headed by longtime CNP members Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo. Two of the CNP’s favored Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, had been confirmed. The court was only one justice away from a conservative majority, and the CNP had its eye on the seat held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With a second term in office and normal attrition, Trump could decisively tilt the federal courts, opening the door for a massive overhaul of the American legal framework.
Many initiatives that were pending in the courts had been addressed by fiat. Trump rolled back scores of environmental regulations created to protect air quality, potable water supplies, and wildlife, as a quid pro quo for the support he received from CNP’s favored oil and gas interests. His administration decimated the budgets and personnel of federal agencies assigned to protect public health, public safety, and public lands, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Park Service, to the benefit of corporations and extractive industries. There was also notable progress on CNP’s social agenda, with the erosion and rollback of the rights of LGBT populations, women, and minorities in the courts and state legislatures.
The CNP’s plutocrats were pleased with what they had wrought. The “tax reform” enacted by Trump and the Republican Senate concentrated ever greater wealth in the hands of America’s most affluent individuals through tax cuts for corporations and the rich, driving income inequality to the highest levels in 50 years. The country’s tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product plummeted, and budget gaps widened, but Republicans—who had made a career of loudly condemning deficit spending—remained mute as long as the measures benefited the moneyed class instead of those who needed help. Donald Trump remained a dependable ally, asking only for an audience for his megalomania and a free pass for the business interests of the “Trump brand.” In return, he delivered his dynamism and his unshakeable base. This state of affairs was so satisfactory that the Republican Party decided not to bother drafting a new party platform for the 2020 election. Instead, it recycled the 2016 platform, which included former CNP President Tony Perkins’s drafts opposing marriage equality and promoting conversion therapy.
Ultimate realization of the CNP’s agenda depended on winning a second term for Trump in November. With another four years, it could enshrine its socially regressive policies on the federal level, further blur the line between church and state, and consolidate huge windfalls for corporations and wealthy individuals. As of January 1, electoral prospects looked sweet. The Republicans’ strongest suit was the economy. Massive tax cuts had flooded corporations with cash, which, as critics of the tax bill had predicted, they used to buy back their stock and drive up share prices 28 percent in 2019. This boosted Trump’s popularity among the 55 percent of Americans who reported owning stocks, but did little to spur the growth Republicans had promised would offset the soaring deficits.
On the tactical front, it seemed as though the Trump team had found a winning formula. Ralph Reed, a member of the CNP’s board of governors (also known as a central figure in the scandal involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff), continued to employ his Faith and Freedom Coalition and its partner, United in Purpose, to get out the vote among conservative white Christians in critical swing states, expanding their targeting from evangelicals to Catholics.
The coalition’s data and app development also advanced. The uCampaign apps developed by Thomas Peters had served their purpose in the 2016 and 2018 elections, but they were due for an upgrade. In late 2019, word began to circulate that Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was preparing to release the Trump 2020 app [123], a component of what he labeled a “juggernaut campaign.” Parscale had quietly taken over Trump’s digital operations and planned to use the new app as part of a broader strategy. Trump 2020 was designed to leverage uCampaign features such as gamification (awarding points and prizes for participating in campaign activities and sharing contacts). It also expanded the use of geolocation devices to recruit and harvest data from attendees of Trump rallies. The crowds, energized by Trump’s live performances, would be invited to download the app and recruit others across their social networks. The rallies were a crucial component of the campaign. The more outrageous Trump’s rhetoric on the podium, the more earned media coverage he received. In contrast, the Democrats were still in disarray, with a dozen primary candidates competing for fragmented press coverage and no clear front-runner.
Then, on January 20, 2020, doctors diagnosed the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the United States.
The patient was a man who had just returned to Snohomish County, Washington, from a family visit to Wuhan, China. The virus spread across Washington State, then ravaged New York City and New Orleans. The first U.S. Covid death was reported as occurring on February 6. On February 20, the global stock market went into a free fall that didn’t abate until April. Bloomberg News called it the Great Coronavirus Crash.
Trump’s reelection strategy rested on a thriving economy, as well as mass rallies and in-church recruitment. Now public health officials were urging lockdowns that would derail both the economy and the gatherings. Trump’s CNP supporters stepped up to the plate.
The CNP’s meetings had long featured briefings on forthcoming elections by members and allies, followed by a memorandum containing a series of “Action Steps.” The October 2018 meeting’s action steps [124], for example, called for members to “Volunteer and Contribute to key candidates and organizations (FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, [anti-abortion group] Susan B. Anthony List) that are engaged in turning out voters” for the midterms.
But by February 2020, the CNP, fearing the erosion of Trump’s support, shifted its strategy from boosting the popular vote to deflecting it. Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council, told the group, “We’ve been focused on the national vote, and obviously we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote, but it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” Her organization, she told them, had already drafted a model resolution “to make sure there’s no confusion among conservative legislators around national popular vote and the Electoral College.”
Nelson noted that her group was exploring additional ways to invalidate a potential Trump loss in consultation with three election experts, including CNP board of governors member Cleta Mitchell, “who I know you all know, on trying to identify what are those action items that legislators can take in their states, and I think that they’ve identified a few. They can write a letter to the secretary of state, questioning the validity of an election, and saying, ‘What did happen that night?’ So we are drafting a lot of those things. If you have ideas in that area, let us know, and we’ll get them to the state legislators, and they can start to kind of exercise their political muscle in that area.”
So as early as February 2020, the CNP and its advisers were already anticipating various strategies to overturn the results of the election in the event of the loss of either the popular vote or the Electoral College, or both. At the same time, they adopted a three-pronged approach to enhancing Trump’s chances in November. The first involved expanding their use of data to juice Republican votes and suppress Democratic turnout. The second was to mobilize supporters in swing states to ignite Tea Party–like protests against the virus-related public safety lockdowns. The third was to deploy physicians with dubious credentials to dismiss the dangers of Covid-19 through a massive media blitz. All three initiatives were activated in April. It was a rehash of a familiar formula, concocting groups whose names and URLs changed with dizzying speed and calling them “grassroots” organizations. (Critics preferred the term “astroturf.”)
United in Purpose took the lead. In June 2016, UiP had convened the epic Times Square gathering of 1,000 fundamentalist activists to give Trump their blessing. Now, over the spring of 2020, UiP held a series of conference calls to update its strategy. One call—a recording of which was leaked to The Intercept reporter Lee Fang—took place in mid-April. UiP Chairman Ken Eldred told his associates on the call that the Covid-19 virus was a “gift from God” because it was turning Americans back to Christ and building audiences for religious broadcasts—which had been crucial platforms for political campaigns. But “Satan has been busy too,” Eldred warned. “The virus has messed up many of our plans involving our in-person meetings with voters.” UiP called its 2020 campaign “Operation Ziklag” (named after a Biblical town that served as a base for the Philistines until it was won by David).
The April call featured various movers and shakers from the CNP. Ralph Reed spoke to the “macro political landscape,” explaining that a key component of the Democrats’ strategy was the Black vote in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democrats had experienced a significant drop-off between 2012 and 2016. “There were 47,000 fewer Black votes cast in just Milwaukee County alone,” Reed told the call participants—in Wisconsin, a state Trump had won by fewer than 24,000 votes.
This was not a coincidence. In September 2020, Britain’s Channel 4 reported [125] that the Trump campaign had used Cambridge Analytica data to profile and target 3.5 million Black voters in 2016, assigning them to a category the campaign called “Deterrence,” with messaging designed to suppress the vote.
Reed told his associates that “his ‘data partners’ had identified 26 million key voters in battleground states, about three-fourths of whom were Facebook users,” The Intercept’s Fang reported. Once again, the 2020 strategy, like the 2016 efforts, would strive to get out the vote for Republicans and suppress the vote of traditional Democrats.
Abortion continued to be a major calling card of the campaign, spearheaded by CNP Gold Circle member Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the Susan B. Anthony List. Dannenfelser, who had recently joined the UiP alliance, told the callers [126] that her organization had conducted surveys on messaging with pro-life working-class voters in battleground Rust Belt states and found that its “born alive” formulation on abortion, promoted by Trump, “has had a tremendous effect in moving persuadable voters in all those areas in Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.” This would strengthen Trump’s chances in the swing states that comprised the “northern path” to victory: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as the “southern path” of North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. (Georgia, assumed to be solidly in the Republican column, would prove a wild card.)
The CNP’s second stratagem to “reopen the economy” debuted around the same time. On April 13, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Robert Costa reported [127] that White House staff had presented Trump with a list of “100 business executives” who could advise him as to how to jump-start the economy. The piece quoted CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie, who began his career under the tutelage of disgraced radio evangelist Billy James Hargis and went on to pioneer the use of direct mail in political marketing. “Obviously, the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans,” Viguerie said. A lot of them, he added, “feel there might be an overreaction to all of this [epidemic].”
According to The Washington Post’s unnamed sources, “The outside effort from conservative groups is expected to be led by Stephen Moore, a conservative at the Heritage Foundation who is close with White House economic officials; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy organization; and Lisa Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative pro-business policy and lobbying organization with ties to the Koch brothers.”
This initiative marked a shift in the CNP profile. Going into the 2016 elections, the public faces of the organization had been prominent fundamentalists. Tony Perkins, CNP president from 2016 to 2019, is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister and longtime head of the fundamentalist lobbying group Family Research Council, and he has hosted Christian nationalists Robert Jeffress and David Barton on his radio broadcasts. Almost half of Trump’s original Evangelical Advisory Board—including Perkins—were members of the CNP, and they were in and out of the Oval Office on a regular basis. But in 2019, Perkins was succeeded as CNP president by William Walton, the founder and chairman of Rappahannock Ventures, a private equity firm, with long ties to the Koch Brothers and a limited religious profile. In 2015, Walton chaired a panel [128] at the CNP, stating, “Most of my career has been spent in business and on Wall Street, and I was among the first to attend the Charles Koch seminars.” Other figures connected to the Koch empire ascended in the CNP hierarchy. Jenny Beth Martin, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots with Koch backing, rose to the office of secretary. Adam Brandon, head of the Koch-founded “grassroots” organization FreedomWorks, took a spot on the board of directors of CNP Action, the organization’s lobbying arm.
David Koch died in August 2019, but his brother Charles carried on. A man with no particular religious profile, Koch embarked on a “charm offensive,” distancing himself from Trump and his fundamentalist allies, presenting himself to the media as a “unifier” (and scrubbing the CNP’s Free Enterprise Award from his profile). But his funding activities told a different story. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Alec Kotch has recorded millions of dollars in grants from Koch and affiliates such as the Donors Trust [129] to organizations run by leading members of the CNP. These include [130] ALEC, as well as the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA. Some of these groups would play important roles in attempts to disrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.
The Washington Post’s April story on the “100 business leaders” initiative made no mention of the CNP, despite the fact that among the leading figures, Moore was on the CNP board of governors, Nelson was a member, and Martin and Brandon were officers. Moore warned the Post that the disaffection of “the right” presented a growing threat to public order, neglecting to mention the ways the CNP was stoking the flames. “There’s a massive movement on the right now, growing exponentially,” he said. “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets by conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states. People are at the boiling point.”
The “boiling point” materialized over the next two weeks, as Moore forecast, with the assistance of another CNP-linked effort called Convention of States, led by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and CNP Gold Circle member. He told the Post [131] his group would function as a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported [132] that the coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns. “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about the protests across the country.” The most publicized events occurred at the Michigan statehouse on April 15 and May 1, when armed protesters invaded the state Capitol, but these were far from the only ones.
The new “businessmen’s group,” previewed in The Washington Post as “100 business executives,” officially debuted on April 27, billed as the “Save Our Country Coalition.” It called for a series of measures to reopen the economy, flying in the face of expert medical recommendations for curbing the epidemic, whose U.S. death toll now approached 55,000. The CNP was heavily represented among the group’s leadership, including stalwarts such as Richard Viguerie, Ed Meese, and Kenneth Blackwell, as well as rising stars Adam Brandon, Jenny Beth Martin, and Lisa Nelson.
One notable addition was a California physician named Dr. Simone Gold [133]. Over the summer, she emerged as a key player in the third prong of the CNP’s campaign, the war against public health policy, the result of another set of conference calls between Trump campaign staff and members of CNP Action. On one April call, published by the Center for Media and Democracy, CNP President William Walton told the group, “We need to make not just the economic argument, we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us.” Within days, Gold began to appear across right-wing media platforms, promoting the false message that hydroxychloroquine (a medication used to treat autoimmune diseases) was both a prophylactic and a cure for Covid-19 (as reported [134] in the September 2020 Washington Spectator). On June 1, The Guardian [135] quoted Brandon’s report that he had raised $800,000 along the way to a $5 million multiplatform media blitz for the campaign.
On July 27, Jenny Beth Martin, Gold, and a dozen other physicians held a Washington, D.C., press conference to deliver their dangerous message. The video reached millions of viewers on Breitbart and President Trump’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter feeds. Major social media platforms quickly removed it as a violation of their Covid-19 misinformation policies, but Gold’s message has continued to circulate on alternative platforms.
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Trump and the CNP doubled down. On August 19, the CNP opened its meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City with a panel featuring attorney Sidney Powell. Two days later, Donald Trump addressed the CNP in his single major convention-eve event. Over chants of “USA! USA!” Trump acknowledged key supporters by name, including CNP President William Walton, Executive Director Bob McEwen, and Secretary Jenny Beth Martin. His rambling speech attacked familiar enemies and lauded familiar friends, including evangelicals, extractive industries, and the gun lobby. Photos from the event showed several hundred tightly packed, unmasked guests in the ballroom. That afternoon’s program featured attorney Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma native and a longtime CNP board of governors member, on panels called “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Executive committee member Brent Bozell III told his fellow members that the left plans to “steal this election.”
“And if they get away with that, what happens?” Bozell demanded. “Democracy is finished because they usher in totalitarianism.”
Trump’s speech to the CNP was released by the White House and widely covered by the national press, but news organizations gave short shrift to the CNP and the scope of its operations. (The New York Times, for example, identified [136] it as merely “a conservative group.”)
But the CNP was becoming less of a mystery. Over the previous months, a small band of researchers had made significant progress in shining a light on the organization’s agenda. Brent Allpress, an academic in Australia, found a back door into its online archives and began to access records of past meetings, which were used in a British documentary called People You May Know (in which this reporter also appears). Two watchdog organizations stepped up their monitoring of the CNP: The Center for Media and Democracy added new funding streams and strategic initiatives, as well as publishing CNP files sourced from Brent Allpress, and Documented found additional CNP meeting materials. Both groups posted meeting agendas, videos of presentations, and—critically—the updated membership rosters for September 2020 that Allpress had accessed. CNP had intentionally elevated its profile, but now it was in danger of losing its cloak altogether.
The rest of the August CNP meeting was held under the usual conditions of secrecy, but this time its proceedings were leaked to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr., who published an account on October 14. The CNP leaders were sounding notes of alarm. “This is a spiritual battle. This is good versus evil,” CNP president Walton told [137] the group. “We have to do everything possible to win.” Trump’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 crisis was hurting his chances at the polls, and Democratic voters were newly energized. The old messaging about abortion and unisex bathrooms looked less compelling as the pandemic death toll mounted and millions were thrown out of work.
The CNP went into crisis mode, focusing on the mechanics of the election. Charlie Kirk, head of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA and a relatively new member, took the stage to celebrate the closure of campuses, which could deprive the Democrats of a half-million student votes. “So, please keep the campuses closed,” he said [138]. Executive committee member Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, asked his audience for ideas to foil mail-in voting: “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do.”
The lawyers in the room were eager to help. One of them, the CNP board member Cleta Mitchell, was a partner in the influential Milwaukee-based law firm Foley and Lardner. She also served on the board of directors of the ultraconservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. In 2020, the Bradley Foundation granted [139] hundreds of thousands of dollars to ALEC, FreedomWorks, and the CNP itself.
Cleta Mitchell had worked closely with another leading CNP member on election matters in recent years. This was Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a member of the board of directors of CNP Action. Ginni Thomas was known as the not-so-secret weapon of the CNP and its allies. A longtime supporter of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, she had spoken at the organization’s student conference and served on its advisory council. She was listed as a contributor at the Daily Caller, the online media platform founded and funded by fellow CNP members. At the May 2019 CNP meeting, Thomas and Mitchell offered a joint presentation on electoral strategies, and at the February 2020 meeting, Heritage Foundation alumna Rachel Bovard praised Thomas as a key liaison to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington,” Bovard said [138]. (Bovard joined Thomas on the board of CNP Action shortly afterward.)
A few weeks later, the CNP received some important news. On September 18, Justice Ginsburg had died, at the age of 87, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. CNP affiliates swung into action, repeating the process that had won them two previous conservative justices under the Trump administration. Kelly Shackelford, CNP vice president and chairman of CNP Action, had described [140] his operation at the meeting the previous February, as reported by The Washington Post: “He bragged about extensive behind-the-scenes coordination by his group and other non-profit organizations to influence the White House selection of federal judges. ‘Some of us literally opened a whole operation on judicial nominations and vetting,’ he said. ‘We poured millions of dollars into this to make sure the president has good information, he picks the right judges.’”
Shackelford’s forces promoted the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, another Federalist Society alum, to fill Ginsburg’s seat. Barrett was a longtime CNP favorite. Investigative journalist Robert Maguire learned [141] that, as of July 2018, the domain name “confirmbarrett.com” had already been reserved by the Judicial Crisis Network, founded and chaired by CNP board of governors member Gary Marx and closely aligned with the Federalist Society. The Judicial Crisis Network went on to spend at least $9.4 million in television spots and $4.3 million in digital ads, direct mail, and text messaging to promote Barrett’s nomination, according to a report [142] by Michael Biesecker and Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press.
September 26 was another red-letter day for the CNP. President Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to announce Barrett’s nomination, and the CNP treated the event as a victory lap. Once confirmed, Barrett would serve as the fulcrum for the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century, the fulfillment of decades of hard work by CNP strategists. At least 15 members of the CNP were listed among the attendees at the Rose Garden event—equal to the combined number of White House officials and members of Congress present. Among the crowd were [143] old CNP warhorses Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, as well as newly prominent election wranglers Jenny Beth Martin, Cleta Mitchell, and Tom Fitton. Exactly one month later, on October 26—one week before the election—Amy Coney Barrett would be confirmed as the Supreme Court’s new associate justice, after her nomination sailed through the Republican-controlled Senate.
But the Rose Garden event may have also constituted the CNP’s last hurrah for the Trump era. Defying urgent public health advisories, more than 150 guests sat in tight rows, mostly maskless, engaging in spirited conversation. Two weeks later, Dr. Anthony Fauci decried [144] it as a “superspreader event,” as at least seven attendees tested positive for Covid-19—including Donald and Melania Trump.
On Election Day, November 3, the nation held its breath. Ralph Reed’s massive get-out-the-vote effort had driven up turnout, but so had the Democrats. On November 4, as the results hung in abeyance, a site called StoptheSteal.us was registered. It was discovered [145] the following day by Brent Allpress, who traced its registration to an account called “Vice and Victory,” owned by a curious figure named Ali Alexander. Alexander was sometimes known as “Ali Akbar,” the name he was listed under as a member of the CNP on 2017 and 2018 rosters. He began to use the name “Alexander [146]” after pleading guilty to two counts of felony in 2007 and 2008. As “Ali Alexander,” he announced [147] the launch of #StoptheSteal on Twitter with a list of 15 partners and the text, “Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election.” One of them was CNP member Ed Martin, head of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles Forum Fund.
A new Stop the Steal Facebook group had appeared on November 4 and was banned the following day. The Washington Post quoted [148] the page’s recruitment of “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote” and solicitation of donations to cover “‘flights and hotels to send people’ to battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.” According to the Post, the “Stop the Steal” group appeared as a co-host on 12 different Facebook protest listings, among them one for a car caravan from California. The group gained 360,000 members before it was removed for violating Facebook’s rules for inflammatory content, as users called for “civil war” and “overthrowing the government.”
According to Allpress, the StoptheSteal.us site provided organizational information for protests on November 6 at counting centers and capitols across six “contested” swing states. CNP member Charlie Kirk was listed as the primary organizational contact for Nevada protests, along with alt-right activist Mike Cernovich. The Center for Media and Democracy reported [145] the state-level involvement of other CNP members and added that FreedomWorks, run by CNP Action board of governors member Adam Brandon, was organizing “Protect the Vote” protests in five states.
On November 6, as Biden pulled ahead, Jenny Beth Martin announced [149] that Tea Party Patriot Action was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in four swing states, “working with FreedomWorks, Turning Points [sic], Heritage”—all run by members of the CNP—“and countless social media influencers to help organize and assemble citizens in various locations around the country to voice our support for transparent and honest ballot counting.”
The election was called for Joe Biden on November 7, based on late-counted ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Attorney Cleta Mitchell made her feelings known on Fox News, stating [150], “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted,” and tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!”
The CNP refused to surrender and convened a special meeting November 12 to 14. Mitchell appeared at the meeting on an updated panel, now called “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” And CNP Action answered the question with a new set of “Action Steps.”
These directed [151] members to lobby legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada to support litigation challenging the election outcome; to “actively educate your pastor and church” with resources from Charlie Kirk, the Family Research Council, and others; to “reach out” to 10 CNP affiliates engaged in the Georgia runoff election; and (ominously) to “connect with local law enforcement.”
Other measures were being set in motion. A familiar figure resurfaced: Trump’s first national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Flynn, too, had a history with the CNP. In July 2016, Flynn appeared [152] on a CNP panel on “Terrorism and the Condition of the Military.” Academic researcher Allpress found [153] Flynn listed in a Zoominfo database of “email addresses and direct dials for the Council for National Policy employees” with a CNP phone number (first listed on November 26 and still active as of February 11—throughout the period when he was appearing at the Stop the Steal protests, including in the January 6, 2021, WildProtest rally).
Dispelling any possibility of the entry representing another “Mike Flynn,” the listing was linked to his 2016 CNP panel appearance.
Ginni Thomas is listed in the same CNP employee database, also as having an undisclosed staff role.
Flynn’s affiliations underscore a disturbing link between Trump’s team and the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon. On July 7, 2020, the CNN reported that Flynn had tweeted a video of himself taking an oath with a QAnon slogan, accompanied by a QAnon hashtag.
In the weeks following the election, Flynn appeared [154] on a December 4 Red State Talk Radio program called “In the Matrixxx: General Flynn Digital Soldiers.” This was a term Flynn had introduced [155] in a May 2016 speech, as a force to combat the “insurgency” created by the professional news media: “So the American people decided to take over the idea of information . . . and they did it through social media.” In his introduction, Matrixxx host Jeffrey Pederson urged, “Patriots, join us in a Q army. Are you guys ready for some booms?” In a telephone interview, he congratulated Michael Flynn on his November 25 presidential pardon for lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation. “We are your digital soldiers, sir.”
Flynn replied, “The digital army that we have is unstoppable. . . . When I see people that don’t want to fight on the battlefield, the Twitter space, the Facebook space, we don’t necessarily choose the terrain that we want to fight on, but when we get on that terrain, and we’re on it . . . we fight like digital soldiers, and we will overcome everything.”
When host Jeffrey Pederson complained that his program had been taken down from a number of major digital platforms, Flynn answered, “Digital Soldiers is gonna have a capability soon. . . . We need a new platform of truth, it’s gonna happen.”
Concerning “this disastrous election we’ve just had,” Flynn adhered to the CNP party line concentrating on state-level action. “We are going to win. We have to be patient, we have to persevere through this, we have to be committed to fight for the truth in these various swing states where the hearings have been occurring. . . . For the people that are in those states, those affected states, you need to be calling your representatives, you need to be going to these rallies that they’re having at the state capitals, and you need to be putting demands on your state officials, your state political class, to not accept this gross . . . this abuse of our election system.”
On December 10, the CNP’s Conservative Action Project published [156] a letter stating, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election.” It stated that “state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It further called on conservative leaders and groups to implement the strategy discussed at the previous CNP meeting and pressure their state and national representatives to replace the electors. The letter was signed by over a dozen members of the CNP, including the president, the executive director, and executive committee member Jenny Beth Martin.
Over the course of November, Stop the Steal organizers had summoned their supporters to join a series of pro-Trump “Jericho Marches” and prayer vigils around the country. These included [157] a “March for Trump” 20-city bus tour organized by Women for America First, one of Tea Party activists Amy Kremer’s organizations, culminating in a December 12 rally in Washington D.C. Michael Flynn was a headliner for the event, and his speech was recorded by the Right Side Broadcasting Network and posted on YouTube. Standing over a Women for America First podium before the Supreme Court, Flynn proclaimed, “We are not going to give up!” His words were met by chants of “Stop the Steal!” from the crowd—which included hundreds of Proud Boys and QAnon supporters in combat fatigues and paramilitary gear. Flynn closed [158] his remarks with a blessing for the military, first responders, and the police. “They’re fighting on the front lines of freedom right now—for us.”
Legal efforts to overturn the election results continued, but counts and recounts of the ballots came up with the same results, and the challenges were dismissed by courts across the country. Trump’s circle of trusted advisers was shrinking, and the president considered desperate measures.
On Friday, December 18, an extraordinary meeting took place in the White House with four participants who had not been recorded on the official calendar, among them Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell, both of whom had ties to the CNP. According to a February 6 account of that meeting in The New York Times, Sidney Powell proposed that Trump appoint her special counsel to investigate voter fraud, and Trump considered naming Flynn head of the FBI and chief of staff for the rest of his administration.
The previous day, December 17, the right-wing site Newsmax had posted an interview [159] with Flynn. “The president has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is,” Flynn said. “This is just totally unsatisfactory. There’s no way in the world we’re going to be able to move forward as a nation with this. . . .He could immediately on his order seize every single one of these machines around the country on his order. He could also order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented.”
Now, in the White House meeting of December 18, witnesses reported that Powell and Flynn urged [160] Trump to consider the National Emergencies Act and “extraordinary measures” to address the electoral outcome. Others in the meeting objected, and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff General James McConville quickly issued a statement [161] saying, “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”
As the options diminished, CNP members doubled down. On January 2, President Trump held a conference call [150] with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he famously ordered Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes—one more than Biden’s margin of victory. The CNP’s Cleta Mitchell, one of three lawyers on the call, was identified by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as one of the “attorneys that represent the president—who is not the attorney of record but has been involved [in the efforts to challenge the electoral results].” Mitchell reinforced [162] Trump’s false claims of fraud and pressed Raffensperger to hand over his investigations of the allegations.
Once again, the effort backfired. The Raffensperger call was leaked to the press, and the Georgia official was lauded as a champion of democracy for resisting Trump’s bullying behavior. Mitchell resigned [163] from her position at Foley and Lardner, based on the firm’s policy that its attorneys would not represent “any parties seeking to contest the results of the election.”
Trump’s paths to victory were diminishing by the day. The next juncture was January 6, when Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College vote. Stop the Steal had been mobilizing for weeks, with the support of the president’s Twitter feed.
The CNP connection surfaced on a number of fronts, as reflected in a chronology published [164] by The Washington Post. On December 20, the domain “WildProtest” was registered. The Post’s Philip Bump wrote, “It appears to be the brainchild of Ali Alexander” (the onetime CNP member and former Ali Akbar). On January 2, Amy Kremer of Women for America First tweeted, “We are excited to announce the site of our January 6 event will be the Ellipse in President’s Park, just steps from the White House!” Kremer appeared in the CNP’s 2014 roster on the CNP board of governors, listed as chairman of the Tea Party Express. Her daughter Kylie Kremer took out the National Park Service permit [165] for the “March for Trump,” dated January 5, 2021.
CNP affiliates took action on a local level. Two days before the protest, Charlie Kirk tweeted that his organizations were “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” (Kirk was indulging in hyperbole. Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet later confirmed [166] to Reuters that Kirk’s organization, Turning Point Action, sent “seven buses carrying 350 students” to the rally, but added that the group “condemns political violence.”) Another tweet from Turning Point Action invited [167] protesters to “ride a bus & receive priority entry” and “stay in a complimentary hotel.” Both tweets were deleted after January 6. In Lynchburg, Virginia, more than 100 protesters boarded [168] buses organized by Liberty Counsel Action, chaired by CNP board of governors member Mat Staver.
CNP member Ginni (Mrs. Clarence) Thomas promoted [169] the protest on her Twitter feed on January 6, tweeting, “Watch MAGA crowd today best with Right Side Broadcasting (https://rsbnetwork.com/ [170]), and then C‑Span for what the Congress does starting at 1:00 pm today. LOVE MAGA people!!!!”
On another front, CNP member Scott Magill, a retired military physician who had joined the hydroxychloroquine campaign, summoned [171] “fellow Warriors and Friends” to the protest on behalf of his organization, Veterans in Defense of Liberty. Magill had made a video presentation to a 2017 CNP meeting, which was accessed by Brent Allpress, describing VIDOL as a national organization made up of “battalions” and “companies,” formed to “identify and oppose all who would destroy our freedom, our Judeo-Christian values, our culture, or our morals.” It was expanded, he said, to include a “cavalry division of Veteran motorcycle riders” that could function as a “peaceful rapid response team.”
Jenny Beth Martin claimed a major role in the day’s events. On December 30, she tweeted [172], “I will be speaking at the #StoptheSteal rally on January 6. We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” She indicated that her protégé, Dr. Simone Gold (the mouthpiece for Covid misinformation), would be speaking as well. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots were listed as one of the 11 participating organizations on the March to Save America website (along with Turning Point Action and Phyllis Schlafly Eagles). The site announced [173], “At 1:00 pm we will march on the US Capitol building to protest the certification of the Electoral College.” (The webpage included an automatic SMS opt-in and a Covid-19 disclaimer waiving any claims against the organizers for “illness or injury.”)
On Tuesday, January 5, Trump supporters gathered [174] at Freedom Plaza in Washington for a Stop the Steal “pre-rally.” Ali Alexander led them in cries of “Victory or Death!” Michael Flynn told them, “We stand at a crucible moment in United States history,” and local CBS affiliate reporter Mike Valerio tweeted [175] from the scene, “We’ve heard General Mike Flynn give a salute / shoutout to QAnon soldiers.”
On January 6, thousands of protesters converged on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. President Trump addressed his followers in strident tones, urging them to “walk down to the Capitol,” “show strength,” and “demand that Congress do the right thing.” Then he departed for the White House to watch the day’s events on television.
The crowd moved toward the Capitol and invaded its halls, attacking Capitol police officers and vandalizing the premises. Simone Gold reprised [176] her speech in the Rotunda, condemning the Covid-19 vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” Some members of the mob clutched Bibles and carried signs reading “Jesus Saves.” Americans were stunned by shocking images of men in paramilitary gear snaking up the Capitol steps, of the mob assaulting a prostrate police officer, of extremists brandishing zip-tie handcuffs in the Senate chamber.
On the Senate floor, Brent Bozell IV was recorded [177] entering the chamber, speaking on a cell phone, then repositioning the C‑SPAN camera to point at the floor. Bozell is the son of Brent Bozell III, a 30-year veteran of the CNP and a member of the executive committee.
In the aftermath of the attack, Charlie Kirk and other supporters of the protest deleted their tweets, but many had already been archived. Simone Gold expressed “regret” for her actions, but on January 18 she was arrested by the FBI on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct. Gold’s sponsor, Jenny Beth Martin—who was scheduled to speak on January 5 but did not—told [174] Robert O’Harrow of The Washington Post that her group had provided no financial support for the rally. “We were shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events Wednesday afternoon,” she said.
On January 6, Brent Bozell III gave an interview to Fox Business describing the riot as “an explosion of pent-up outrage from Middle America.” He said, “Look, they are furious because they believe this election was stolen. . . .I agree with them.” He condemned the breaching of the Capitol, blaming it on “one element that went forward in lawlessness.” His son was charged [178] with participating in the breach by the FBI 10 days later.
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The CNP’s affiliates were by no means acting alone in attempting to overturn the results of the election, or in their support for the Capitol protest on January 6. The evidence shows various networks at work: civilian and military, independent and intersecting, feckless and murderous.
What is irrefutable is that members of the CNP and their circle exerted their influence and manipulated their followers to support Trump’s lies about the stolen election and his effort to derail the electoral process. Many of these people emerged as key players in the efforts to disrupt America’s 220-year-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and stoked the fury of insurrectionists who desecrated American democracy on that fateful January afternoon.
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“The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year. From the beginning, its goals represented a convergence of the interests of these three groups: a retreat from advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and raw political power. Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP. Favorite sons, such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were groomed, financed, and supported. Apostates, such as John McCain and Jeff Flake, were punished and exiled. The leaders of the CNP tended to favor their conservative Christian co-religionists, but political expedience came first.”
Formed in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory. It’s hard to come up with a more troubling origin story for a contemporary political group. Especially a group dedicated to operating in the shadows and barely known to the general public. For four decades the CNP has been operating as a kind of secret umbrella group for the Christian hard right. And then the 2020 election came along and the mask drops entirely. Because as we just saw, it was the CNP that was playing a lead role in organizing the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results months before the first votes were cast. By February 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic getting underway threatening Trump’s reelection chances, the CNP began planning to the overturn the election for Trump no matter the outcome of the vote. As we’ve seen, Cleta Mitchell — a member of the CNP board of governors and long-standing go-to conservative for justifying the worst kind of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics [12] — became the point-person for organizing the legal strategies for overturning election results at the state-level. Recall how Mitchell was sitting in on the now notorious Jan 2, 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger demanding that they “find” the votes he needed to win the state, resulting in Mitchell’s law firm effectively kicking her out of the firm [13]. Mitchell’s involvement in overturning the 2020 election arguably goes back to August of 2019, when she co-chaired a high-level working group that ended up advocating for radical reading of the constitution that would enable state legislatures to override the popular vote [14]. Mitchell has been working on overturning the 2020 election from its inception right up to the insurrection. And she’s just one of the prominent CNP officials who was heavily invested in overturning the election through any means necessary:
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Ultimate realization of the CNP’s agenda depended on winning a second term for Trump in November. With another four years, it could enshrine its socially regressive policies on the federal level, further blur the line between church and state, and consolidate huge windfalls for corporations and wealthy individuals. As of January 1, electoral prospects looked sweet. The Republicans’ strongest suit was the economy. Massive tax cuts had flooded corporations with cash, which, as critics of the tax bill had predicted, they used to buy back their stock and drive up share prices 28 percent in 2019. This boosted Trump’s popularity among the 55 percent of Americans who reported owning stocks, but did little to spur the growth Republicans had promised would offset the soaring deficits....
But by February 2020, the CNP, fearing the erosion of Trump’s support, shifted its strategy from boosting the popular vote to deflecting it. Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council, told the group, “We’ve been focused on the national vote, and obviously we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote, but it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” Her organization, she told them, had already drafted a model resolution “to make sure there’s no confusion among conservative legislators around national popular vote and the Electoral College.”
Nelson noted that her group was exploring additional ways to invalidate a potential Trump loss in consultation with three election experts, including CNP board of governors member Cleta Mitchell, “who I know you all know, on trying to identify what are those action items that legislators can take in their states, and I think that they’ve identified a few. They can write a letter to the secretary of state, questioning the validity of an election, and saying, ‘What did happen that night?’ So we are drafting a lot of those things. If you have ideas in that area, let us know, and we’ll get them to the state legislators, and they can start to kind of exercise their political muscle in that area.”
So as early as February 2020, the CNP and its advisers were already anticipating various strategies to overturn the results of the election in the event of the loss of either the popular vote or the Electoral College, or both. At the same time, they adopted a three-pronged approach to enhancing Trump’s chances in November. The first involved expanding their use of data to juice Republican votes and suppress Democratic turnout. The second was to mobilize supporters in swing states to ignite Tea Party–like protests against the virus-related public safety lockdowns. The third was to deploy physicians with dubious credentials to dismiss the dangers of Covid-19 through a massive media blitz. All three initiatives were activated in April. It was a rehash of a familiar formula, concocting groups whose names and URLs changed with dizzying speed and calling them “grassroots” organizations. (Critics preferred the term “astroturf.”)
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Note that one the key figures who was already anticipating the need to overturn the election results at that Feb 2020 CNP event was Lisa Nelson, CNP member and CEO of ALEC, and she informed the group she was already working with GOP attorneys including Cleta Mitchell [17]. It’s the perfect example of how the planning to overturn the election results was a joint Koch/CNP operation from the start.
Then there’s the “100 business executives” that the White House staff presented to Trump back in April 2020, just months into the pandemic, who could give advice on how to jump-start the economy. It turns out this was a CNP-led effort too, with CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie talking to reporters about it. The effort was expected to be led by Stephen Moore, Jenny Beth Martin, Adam Brandon, and Lisa Nelson, the CEO of ALEC. All CNP members [32]. At the same time, the newest president of the CNP, William Walton, isn’t a high profile religious leader like Tony Perkins. Instead, Walton works private equity with close ties to the Kochs (now just Charles) and a limited religious profile. The CNP has been a merger of the Christian right with the business community from the very beginning. But 2020 was the year those ties really shined in the shadows:
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The CNP’s second stratagem to “reopen the economy” debuted around the same time. On April 13, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Robert Costa reported [127] that White House staff had presented Trump with a list of “100 business executives” who could advise him as to how to jump-start the economy. The piece quoted CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie, who began his career under the tutelage of disgraced radio evangelist Billy James Hargis and went on to pioneer the use of direct mail in political marketing. “Obviously, the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans,” Viguerie said. A lot of them, he added, “feel there might be an overreaction to all of this [epidemic].”According to The Washington Post’s unnamed sources, “The outside effort from conservative groups is expected to be led by Stephen Moore, a conservative at the Heritage Foundation who is close with White House economic officials; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy organization; and Lisa Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative pro-business policy and lobbying organization with ties to the Koch brothers.”
This initiative marked a shift in the CNP profile. Going into the 2016 elections, the public faces of the organization had been prominent fundamentalists. Tony Perkins, CNP president from 2016 to 2019, is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister and longtime head of the fundamentalist lobbying group Family Research Council, and he has hosted Christian nationalists Robert Jeffress and David Barton on his radio broadcasts. Almost half of Trump’s original Evangelical Advisory Board—including Perkins—were members of the CNP, and they were in and out of the Oval Office on a regular basis. But in 2019, Perkins was succeeded as CNP president by William Walton, the founder and chairman of Rappahannock Ventures, a private equity firm, with long ties to the Koch Brothers and a limited religious profile. In 2015, Walton chaired a panel [128] at the CNP, stating, “Most of my career has been spent in business and on Wall Street, and I was among the first to attend the Charles Koch seminars.” Other figures connected to the Koch empire ascended in the CNP hierarchy. Jenny Beth Martin, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots with Koch backing, rose to the office of secretary. Adam Brandon, head of the Koch-founded “grassroots” organization FreedomWorks, took a spot on the board of directors of CNP Action, the organization’s lobbying arm.
David Koch died in August 2019, but his brother Charles carried on. A man with no particular religious profile, Koch embarked on a “charm offensive,” distancing himself from Trump and his fundamentalist allies, presenting himself to the media as a “unifier” (and scrubbing the CNP’s Free Enterprise Award from his profile). But his funding activities told a different story. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Alec Kotch has recorded millions of dollars in grants from Koch and affiliates such as the Donors Trust [129] to organizations run by leading members of the CNP. These include [130] ALEC, as well as the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA. Some of these groups would play important roles in attempts to disrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.
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Then there’s the role Mark Meckler, a CNP Gold Circle member. He decided to turn the Convention of States organization into a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” In other words, Meckler temporarily refocused COS towards whipping up public opposition to the various anti-COVID measures, in particular at the state level, as part of the larger CNP anti-COVID-measures operation [16]. The COS became a clearinghouse of joint CNP/Koch efforts:
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The “boiling point” materialized over the next two weeks, as Moore forecast, with the assistance of another CNP-linked effort called Convention of States, led by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and CNP Gold Circle member. He told the Post [131] his group would function as a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported [132] that the coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns. “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about the protests across the country.” The most publicized events occurred at the Michigan statehouse on April 15 and May 1, when armed protesters invaded the state Capitol, but these were far from the only ones.
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Note the featured panelist who open the August 19, 2020, CNP meeting: Sidney Powell. Followed by an afternoon panel featuring Cleta Mitchell. It was a spiritual battle of good versus evil and in the worlds of CNP president Walton, “We have to do everything possible to win.” And the CNP went into crisis mode, focusing on mechanics. They were getting ready for the big steal. This was August 19, 2020, two and a half months before Election Day:
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Trump and the CNP doubled down. On August 19, the CNP opened its meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City with a panel featuring attorney Sidney Powell. Two days later, Donald Trump addressed the CNP in his single major convention-eve event. Over chants of “USA! USA!” Trump acknowledged key supporters by name, including CNP President William Walton, Executive Director Bob McEwen, and Secretary Jenny Beth Martin. His rambling speech attacked familiar enemies and lauded familiar friends, including evangelicals, extractive industries, and the gun lobby. Photos from the event showed several hundred tightly packed, unmasked guests in the ballroom. That afternoon’s program featured attorney Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma native and a longtime CNP board of governors member, on panels called “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Executive committee member Brent Bozell III told his fellow members that the left plans to “steal this election.”“And if they get away with that, what happens?” Bozell demanded. “Democracy is finished because they usher in totalitarianism.”
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The rest of the August CNP meeting was held under the usual conditions of secrecy, but this time its proceedings were leaked to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr., who published an account on October 14. The CNP leaders were sounding notes of alarm. “This is a spiritual battle. This is good versus evil,” CNP president Walton told [137] the group. “We have to do everything possible to win.” Trump’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 crisis was hurting his chances at the polls, and Democratic voters were newly energized. The old messaging about abortion and unisex bathrooms looked less compelling as the pandemic death toll mounted and millions were thrown out of work.
The CNP went into crisis mode, focusing on the mechanics of the election. Charlie Kirk, head of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA and a relatively new member, took the stage to celebrate the closure of campuses, which could deprive the Democrats of a half-million student votes. “So, please keep the campuses closed,” he said [138]. Executive committee member Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, asked his audience for ideas to foil mail-in voting: “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do.”
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Also note that with Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, on the board of directors of CNP Action, that’s just one more area of clout the CNP would have if the election outcome was thrown to the Supreme Court. Recall how throwing the election to the Supreme Court was one of the Trump team’s strategies for overturning the election [179]. Not that we wouldn’t already expect Clarence Thomas to vote in line with the CNP’s wishes, but it’s an example of just how deep the CNP’s influence runs in DC:
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The lawyers in the room were eager to help. One of them, the CNP board member Cleta Mitchell, was a partner in the influential Milwaukee-based law firm Foley and Lardner. She also served on the board of directors of the ultraconservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. In 2020, the Bradley Foundation granted [139] hundreds of thousands of dollars to ALEC, FreedomWorks, and the CNP itself.Cleta Mitchell had worked closely with another leading CNP member on election matters in recent years. This was Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a member of the board of directors of CNP Action. Ginni Thomas was known as the not-so-secret weapon of the CNP and its allies. A longtime supporter of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, she had spoken at the organization’s student conference and served on its advisory council. She was listed as a contributor at the Daily Caller, the online media platform founded and funded by fellow CNP members. At the May 2019 CNP meeting, Thomas and Mitchell offered a joint presentation on electoral strategies, and at the February 2020 meeting, Heritage Foundation alumna Rachel Bovard praised Thomas as a key liaison to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington,” Bovard said [138]. (Bovard joined Thomas on the board of CNP Action shortly afterward.)
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But of all the CNP members we know of, perhaps the most surprising is Ali Alexander, the Roger Stone acolyte who was leading the StoptheSteal.us movement. Recall how Stone founded StopTheSteal in 2016 to help Trump win the GOP nomination [19]. But Ali Alexander was its public face and leader during the post-2020 election period in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And as we saw, the Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol was seen as the more “wild” rally planned for Jan 6 — as opposed to the Women for America First rally at the Ellipse — and appears to have been the event from which the insurrection actually emerged [20]. Alexander was also making chants of “Victory or Death” at the Jan 5 Stop the Steal rally in DC [21]. Ali Alexander potentially played one of the most significant roles that day in terms of making the insurrection happen. And now we learn Roger Stone’s acolyte is a CNP member. The fact that Michael Flynn spoke at Ali Alexander’s Jan 5 Stop the Steal isn’t particularly surprising either. The two had a similar ‘wild’ insurrectionary vibe:
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On Election Day, November 3, the nation held its breath. Ralph Reed’s massive get-out-the-vote effort had driven up turnout, but so had the Democrats. On November 4, as the results hung in abeyance, a site called StoptheSteal.us was registered. It was discovered [145] the following day by Brent Allpress, who traced its registration to an account called “Vice and Victory,” owned by a curious figure named Ali Alexander. Alexander was sometimes known as “Ali Akbar,” the name he was listed under as a member of the CNP on 2017 and 2018 rosters. He began to use the name “Alexander [146]” after pleading guilty to two counts of felony in 2007 and 2008. As “Ali Alexander,” he announced [147] the launch of #StoptheSteal on Twitter with a list of 15 partners and the text, “Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election.” One of them was CNP member Ed Martin, head of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles Forum Fund.A new Stop the Steal Facebook group had appeared on November 4 and was banned the following day. The Washington Post quoted [148] the page’s recruitment of “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote” and solicitation of donations to cover “‘flights and hotels to send people’ to battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.” According to the Post, the “Stop the Steal” group appeared as a co-host on 12 different Facebook protest listings, among them one for a car caravan from California. The group gained 360,000 members before it was removed for violating Facebook’s rules for inflammatory content, as users called for “civil war” and “overthrowing the government.”
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On Tuesday, January 5, Trump supporters gathered [174] at Freedom Plaza in Washington for a Stop the Steal “pre-rally.” Ali Alexander led them in cries of “Victory or Death!” Michael Flynn told them, “We stand at a crucible moment in United States history,” and local CBS affiliate reporter Mike Valerio tweeted [175] from the scene, “We’ve heard General Mike Flynn give a salute / shoutout to QAnon soldiers.”
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“Victory or Death!” That was the on Jan 5 chant from Stop The Steal organizer Ali Alexander, who just happens to be a CNP member too. It’s at a point where we have to start asking which major organizers of the push to overturn the election results weren’t members of CNP. It points towards one of the grim realities of any attempt to investigate and punish those responsible for insurrection: truly holding those responsible to account would require the prosecution of a number of members of one of the most powerful networks operating in the US today.
What’s Next for Project Blitz? A Bigger Project Blitz With an Expanded Sense of Dominion
Given that the CNP is almost certainly going to face no real repercussions for its role in an attempted coup and will be allowed to continue operating in the shadows with impunity the risk of future overturned elections and insurrections is one of the obvious threats looming over the US right now. But as our look at Project Blitz makes clear, the assault on America’s democracy from the CNP and Christian nationalists isn’t limited to literal assaults like the insurrection. The impact of ‘bill mills’ like Project Blitz is a sustained legislative assault that really does erode constitutional safeguards over time. One state at a time.
And as the following 2021 update on Project Blitz describes, the people behind Project Blitz have a growing vision for what the project can accomplish. In addition to producing bills to promote prayer in school, they had moved on to potential more fertile issues: “Critical Race Theory” and anti-Trans youth bills. Beyond that, it appears Project Blitz has become more sophisticated in covering up its agenda, issuing new guidance to state lawmakers on how to use more secular-sounding language to describe their bills. Keep in mind that this update on Project Blitz was written in July of 2021, months before we witnessed the potency of issues like “Critical Race Theory” in animating the electorate of Virginia [45]. So in terms of what to expect next from this Christian nationalist movement that’s currently on the war path to capture democracy, we should probably expect more of the same, but worse because they’re getting better at it [44]:
The Salon
The Christian nationalist assault on democracy goes stealth — but the pushback is working
Salon’s 2018 reporting helped drive the Christian right’s Project Blitz underground. Now it’s back, on the down-lowBy Paul Rosenberg
Published July 24, 2021 12:14PM (EDT)In April 2018, researcher Frederick Clarkson exposed the existence of Project Blitz [180], a secretive Christian nationalist “bill mill” operating below the radar to shape and enact legislation in dozens of states, using a network of state “prayer caucuses,” many of which had unsuspecting Democratic members. Its plan was to start with innocent-seeming bills, such as requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust,” and to culminate with laying the foundations for a “Handmaid’s Tale”-style theocracy, enshrining bigotry in law under the guise of “religious freedom.”
Salon was the first [64] to report and build on Clarkson’s findings, as well as subsequent progressive organizing efforts [65] which eventually drove Project Blitz back underground, following a high-profile USA Today exposé [57] (Salon follow-up here [34].) Now, three years later, Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, has unearthed the playbooks Project Blitz has used since going dark, and discussed their implications with Salon in an exclusive interview.
“The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing,” Clarkson reported at Religion Dispatches [181]. But there’s another, more hopeful message: These playbooks “also tell a story of the resilience of democratic institutions and leaders in the face of movements seeking to undermine or end them.”
Clarkson told Salon, “While most people to the left of the Christian right view the Project Blitz playbook with revulsion, I see it as a gift to democracy. The playbook and their accompanying briefings and events laid bare their intentions and their game plan.” Because of that, he continued, “We were handed a vital tool for the defense of democratic values and, arguably, the wider defense of democracy itself. The things that happened in response, I think, are underappreciated, even by some of those who should be taking great pride in their victories.”
In particular, Clarkson said, “We were fortunate that Rachel Laser, the then-new president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recognized this right away and made taking on Project Blitz a signature campaign of her presidency.” One highlight of Laser’s work was “organizing dozens [182] of national religious and civil rights organizations to issue a joint letter to state legislators opposing the anti-democratic, Christian nationalist intention” behind Project Blitz.
He also cited the webinars staged for various national groups by Alison Gill of American Atheists, Elizabeth Reiner Platt of Columbia University Law School and Clarkson himself, which “laid out the implications of the Project Blitz campaign,” Clarkson said. (My reporting on that is here [65].) That in turn led to the formation of Blitz Watch, which focused attention on the continuing threat.
In Clarkson’s article for Religion Dispatches, he writes, “In 2020, depending on how one counts, 92 bills were introduced, 8 of which passed. In 2021, so far, 74 bills have been introduced, 14 of which have passed, according to Blitz Watch [183].” So Project Blitz is still in action, and still a threat. But it’s not the massive and successful onslaught that its founders intended and hoped for — and the fact that it was forced into stealth mode shows how successful the pushback has been.
At the end of his story, Clarkson offers this summary:
The ongoing exposure and response to Project Blitz has taught us several things. First, that it’s possible to stand up to and prevail against anti-democratic movements and measures, and that our democratic institutions are more resilient than they sometimes seem. Sen. John Marty showed [184] that — when he spoke up for the integrity of his faith and stood down a national smear campaign led by Fox News, as noted earlier. Librarians and their allies showed that, even in the face of demagogic attacks on the competence and integrity of public libraries, state legislators could be made to see reason. Efforts since 2018 by scores of national organizations organized [185] by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Blitz Watch [186], have also shown that it’s possible to defend democracy and its institutions against a secretive and formidable opponent of democratic values, and of democracy itself. What’s more, journalism has once again shown that sunlight remains the best disinfectant.
Elaborating on this last point, Clarkson told Salon, “Scores of national media outlets covered either Project Blitz directly, or covered the patterns of bills introduced in legislatures across the country, especially the most common, In God We Trust bills…. Thus Project Blitz was exposed as part of wider problem of manipulation of state legislatures, and found itself compared to the tobacco and the pornography industries as corruptors of democratic institutions.”
What’s equally important is that these lessons can also provide tools and strategies to counter the right’s latest culture war offensive — the racist backlash flying under the banner of fighting “critical race theory.” Although the two campaigns are dissimilar in some respects, in both cases the right is defending a founding myth (America as a “Christian nation,” or America as a flawless “beacon of liberty”) and perverting or taking hostage a progressive value to claim it as their own (religious freedom or racial equality). In both cases, the reliance on blatant deception tells us that conservatives themselves understand that progressives hold the stronger hand. The right may be more mobilized now — just as it was before Project Blitz was first exposed — but it won’t win if progressives can learn, and adapt, the lessons of their recent success.
How we got here
As Clarkson first reported, Project Blitz originally divided its bills into three tiers. The first tier aimed at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere. A signature example is display of the motto, “In God We Trust,” a Cold War replacement for “E pluribus unum” — out of many, one — which better reflects America’s pragmatic, pluralist foundations.
The second tier, “Resolutions and Proclamations Recognizing the Importance of Religious History and Freedom,” aimed at making government a partner in “Christianizing” America, largely by promoting bogus historical narratives. For example, Clarkson told me, the model “Civic Literacy Act and the Religion in History Acts,” required the study or posting of “the founding documents” in the public schools, but with a twist:
“Curiously, the Mayflower Compact is included as a founding document,” he said, “but there is no mention of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty [the law Thomas Jefferson wrote which served as the model for the First Amendment] ... because it throws a monkey wrench into the Christian nationalist [187] narrative, which seeks to link Christianity and national identity from the British colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth to the present.”
The third tier contained three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry. “Although category three is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions,” Clarkson explained in a later story [34]. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.’ ”
The basic structure of Project Blitz’s agenda hasn’t changed much, but its presentation has. “The 2020–2021 playbook offers slicker arguments than previous years,” Clarkson notes. “For example, they deny that they seek a theocracy, try not to be overtly Christian, present secular arguments for their legislation and attempt to give the appearance that they respect religious pluralism. But they don’t quite succeed.”
The contradictions he notes are not surprising. Authors of these proposed laws insist, for example, that they’re not out to “change our model of government into a theocracy” and that the bills don’t “mimic or enact any particular religious code.” But the inclusion of “The Ten Commandments Display Act” isn’t very convincing on that score. They further insist that the model bills promote “religious tolerance” and “do not force any religion on anyone,” yet the “National Motto Display Act” calls for the posting of the Christian religious slogan “In God We Trust” [188] in public schools and buildings. Still they allege that “tolerance [is] sorely lacking in those who reject various aspects of religious teaching,” an old talking point that frames rejection of imposed religion in public spaces as “intolerance.”
That last point is another example of how the right attempts to usurp progressive values and turn them on their heads. It also represents an attempt to erase religious liberals, progressives and radicals from the public sphere, by pretending that only “secular humanists” can possibly oppose what they are doing.
The 2019–2020 playbook was more narrowly focused, dealing only with bills related to sexual orientation and gender identity. That made sense, since it was the rapid shift in public attitudes around LGBTQ rights that put the religious right into its current defensive posture, out of which it conceived its counter-offensive: recasting religious bigotry as a defining feature of faith, and claiming a right to discriminate as an essential aspect of “religious freedom.” The fact that the other tiers were dropped from the 2019–2020 playbook is a tell of sorts — but of course the playbook’s authors never expected it to become public.
The 2020–2021 playbook returned to the full three-tier format, under a new rubric of “categories,” adding two additional ones. “Category 4 offers ‘talking points to counter anti-religious freedom legislation,’ which is simply a breakout of the talking points previously included in other sections,” Clarkson notes, while “Category 5 provides four new model policies dealing with prayer in public settings — three for public school settings and one for municipal settings, such as city council meetings.”
One important new ingredient
One new bill that Clarkson draws attention to would criminalize libraries and librarians, and became infamous even before Project Blitz adopted it:
The “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act [189],” introduced by then-freshman Missouri State Rep. Ben Baker [190] (R‑Neosho), ignited a state [191] and national controversy [192] in January 2020 shortly after he took office. …
His bill sought to create “parental review boards” with the authority to “convene public hearings” and restrict access to anything they deemed “age-inappropriate sexual materials.” Not only would their decisions be “final,” but the bill also prescribed fines or jail for librarians who “willingly” violated board decrees regarding what is inappropriate, and included the potential state defunding of libraries accused of violating the statute.
This bill is deceptive in two key ways. First, as Clarkson notes, it “feigns a democratic method to achieve an anti-democratic result.” These board members wouldn’t be chosen in a general election, but by voters who show up in person at a scheduled public meeting where the issue is raised. “Thus the boards could be elected by small groups of zealots able to pack an otherwise routine evening meeting of a town council,” Clarkson writes. These boards would then be given powers to overrule existing library boards, which are either democratically elected or appointed by democratically elected officials. In short, this is an attack on local democratic control, the very principle it pretends to embody.
The second deception is over the term “age-inappropriate sexual materials,” since the impetus for the original bill wasn’t about sexual content at all, but rather gender representation:
Baker said he was originally concerned about the popular-but-sometimes-controversial [193] Drag Queen Story Hour [194] in libraries and bookstores around the country.
Drag Queen Story Hour describes its events simply as “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores … [where] kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.”
Baker sees something more sinister at work. Any break in rigid gender stereotypes is inherently subversive to his snowflake sensibilities, as he explained to the New York Times [195]: “What inspired this bill is becoming aware of what is taking place at our publicly funded libraries with events like Drag Queen Story Hour, and materials that have a clear agenda of grooming our children for the L.G.B.T.Q. community with adult themes and content that fit the description of a objectionable sexual nature.”
In this worldview, any breakdown in rigid gender stereotypes is associated with “grooming our children” for the LGBTQ community,” a trope used by the right dating back at least to the Eisenhower-era John Birch Society, when scientific knowledge about gender orientation and identity was virtually nonexistent. Not only does this lack any scientific credibility, it’s also a hysterical overreaction, since no one is forced to attend Drag Queen Story Hour. If this law were passed, as an official with American Library Association warned, not just Drag Queen Story Hour could be censored, but also displays relating to Pride Month, Black History Month and other specific commemorations.
This attempted intrusion into local library politics is just one example of how Project Blitz overlaps with the new wave of white backlash under the banner of fighting “critical race theory.” For several decades, the right has repeatedly mobilized to take over nonpartisan school boards, and occasionally library boards, as a way of building grassroots power and grooming candidates for higher office. Such elections usually have low turnout and relatively little campaign organization, which makes them attractive targets for extremists running scare-tactic campaigns. The parental oversight bill takes things one step further by empowering small activist groups who invadie local government meetings, but the organizing principle is the same: Use fear and stealth to seize power, and use simulated democratic legitimacy to advance a divisive, reactionary agenda.
These library-centered battles served to underscore a broader point that Clarkson made to Salon. “When people are invested in democratic institutions like public libraries, or any aspect of government, it is important not to ‘other-ize’ government, which in a democratic society is intended to be an expression and function of what we need and want to do together, and is necessarily an expression of democratic values,” Clarkson said.
“That librarians and allies around the country rallied to the defense of the archives of democratic knowledge, culture and practice is a case example of how we need not be bullied by Christian right demagoguery. Screechy charges may make headlines and bring in ad revenue on right-wing talk radio, but most people, most of the time, do not want their schools and libraries messed with by authoritarian bigots and mobs of the easily led.”
Reflecting on lessons learned
Exposure was the key to success, according to two important figures in this struggle, both mentioned above. Rachel Laser is president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, and Alison Gill is vice president for legal and policy matters at American Atheists.
“To oppose Project Blitz effectively, we first had to raise awareness about this campaign,” Gill said.
“Project Blitz’s strategy was to start with seemingly less controversial legislation that organizers thought they could slip past the public,” Laser said, “then build to even more harmful, more controversial bills. They had some success early on. But once we exposed that strategy and people became aware of Project Blitz and its agenda of codifying Christian nationalism, the initiative began to unravel, because people don’t want to force religious beliefs on public schoolchildren and they don’t want our laws to license discrimination in the name of religious freedom.”
Gill focused more on exposing the secretive workings behind the Project Blitz operation. “At first, the campaign worked discreetly and without broadcasting their intentions to lure unsuspecting lawmakers into state prayer caucuses,” she said. “These caucuses then provided a structure with which to pursue the Project Blitz legislation. By elevating the campaign to media and lawmakers, highlighting its connection to Christian nationalism and showing that these bills were not organically driven by in-state interest, we succeeded in neutralizing their advantage.”
Gill cited two other lessons as well. “Our work to oppose Project Blitz reinforced the importance of cross-movement collaboration,” she said. “Project Blitz is a campaign that targets civil rights in multiple fields — LGBTQ equality, access to reproductive services and religious equality — and so coordination with organizations across affected movements was required to effectively oppose it.”
That took time and crucial information, Laser added: “It wasn’t until we learned of the Project Blitz playbook and their organizing strategy that we were able to build a coalition of allies to fight this movement at its source, rather than only state by state and bill by bill.”
...
More worrisome than Project Blitz itself, Gill said, are the forces behind it. “The same forces pushing forward Project Blitz have now seized upon new issues, and they are already flooding state legislatures with dangerous model bills,” she said. “There were at least four major waves of harmful legislation propagated in 2021: anti-trans youth legislation, religious exemptions to COVID-related public health protections, broad denial-of-care bills, and bills that undermine abortion access.”
Of those, she says the most dangerous element is a “renewed emphasis on Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) measures at the state level. RFRAs create a limited exemption from state laws whenever religious organizations say that their activities are burdened. RFRAs have been used to attack nondiscrimination protections, access to contraception and abortion, and even child labor laws.”
Such laws were a major focus of conservative activism during Barack Obama’s presidency, although “none were successfully passed after significant public setbacks in 2015 in states like Indiana,” Gill noted. “In the wake of the pandemic and state-imposed public health restrictions,” she said, “activists have rebranded these bills as necessary to protect churches from government overreach.” Three states — Arkansas, Montana and South Dakota — passed RFRAs this year, and we should expect to see many more coming in 2022, she warns.
It’s also important to consider how these lessons can be applied to the racist backlash formulated around the bogeyman term “critical race theory,” which Fox News has repeated thousands of times [196] without ever clearly defining it. This can be seen in the state legislative map as well. repeated thousands of times [196] has tracked efforts in 27 states to “restrict education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics,” compared to efforts in 12 states to expand education. Brookings reports [197] that seven states have passed such laws, though only one explicitly mentions “critical race theory.” Brookings lists actions taken by state boards of education, other state actors and local school boards as well. So the scope of right-wing activism is clear, as is the need for an effective response.
For Laser, the parallels are clear. “White Christian nationalism is the belief that America is and must remain a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants, and that our laws and policies must reflect this premise,” she said. “They completely reject church-state separation. White Christian nationalists oppose equality for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and the nonreligious.
“The same white Christian nationalist ideology that is behind Project Blitz is also driving the backlash against a deliberate caricature of critical race theory,” she continued. “Therefore, a similar strategy to the one that has hamstrung Project Blitz — recapturing the narrative about our nation’s ideals, exposing the real intent of the extremists, making clear how their agenda harms freedom and equality for all of us, and bringing together a diverse coalition of people and groups to speak out against this harmful movement — should be part of the strategy to combat opponents of racial justice.”
Gill sees similarities, but differences as well. “Both campaigns are similar in that they focus on redefining and manipulating language for political advantage — ‘religious freedom’ and ‘critical race theory,’ respectively,” she said. “However, there are also significant differences. The anti-CRT campaigns seem at once better funded and less organized than Project Blitz. Moreover, there is a degree of moral panic associated with the anti-CRT efforts that was not as present for Project Blitz.”
Still, she offered three specific lessons learned from the resistance to Project Blitz:
1. Raise awareness about the anti-CRT campaign and bring to light where it came from, who is funding it and for what purposes.
2. Build collaboration between the various sectors that support diversity education in schools to push back against anti-CRT efforts. Successful coalitions must include educators, experts in diversity education, political leaders, civil rights leaders, parents and students.
3. Ensure that tools and messaging to oppose anti-CRT efforts are effective and widely available.If America’s founding was really “as pristine as the religious myth requires it to be,” Clarkson observed, “it cannot be marked by the racism and genocide that the facts of history reveal. History is thus an existential crisis for Christian nationalist beliefs. That’s why history must be revised and the evils that mark so much of our history be erased, rather than acknowledged and addressed. The attack on the straw man of CRT is of a piece with what we might call the purification of American history in the name of God’s history.”
But history and politics tend to be messy, not pure. “The Christian right, supported in part by the Project Blitz playbooks, is using — and mastering — the tools and institutions of democracy in order to erode or end them,” Clarkson said. “They know that well-organized factions can win elections, beginning with low-turnout party primaries, and that the Christian Right minority can gain the mantle of democratic legitimacy by out-organizing those of us who actually believe in it.” So it’s up to “everyone to the left of the Christian Right,” as Clarkson puts it, to mobilize for democracy.
...
———-
“Salon was the first [64] to report and build on Clarkson’s findings, as well as subsequent progressive organizing efforts [65] which eventually drove Project Blitz back underground, following a high-profile USA Today exposé [57] (Salon follow-up here [34].) Now, three years later, Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, has unearthed the playbooks Project Blitz has used since going dark, and discussed their implications with Salon in an exclusive interview.”
Launched in 2016, Project Blitz was no longer a secret movement by 2021. It had been exposed in 2018 by people like Frederick Clarkson and was forced to retool and repackage the agenda. Which is exactly what Project Blitz did, reworking the playbook with advice to legislators to cloak the intent of the model legislation with secular-sounding language. The Blitz got a makeover:
...
“The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing,” Clarkson reported at Religion Dispatches [181]. But there’s another, more hopeful message: These playbooks “also tell a story of the resilience of democratic institutions and leaders in the face of movements seeking to undermine or end them.”...
As Clarkson first reported, Project Blitz originally divided its bills into three tiers. The first tier aimed at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere. A signature example is display of the motto, “In God We Trust,” a Cold War replacement for “E pluribus unum” — out of many, one — which better reflects America’s pragmatic, pluralist foundations.
The second tier, “Resolutions and Proclamations Recognizing the Importance of Religious History and Freedom,” aimed at making government a partner in “Christianizing” America, largely by promoting bogus historical narratives. For example, Clarkson told me, the model “Civic Literacy Act and the Religion in History Acts,” required the study or posting of “the founding documents” in the public schools, but with a twist:
“Curiously, the Mayflower Compact is included as a founding document,” he said, “but there is no mention of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty [the law Thomas Jefferson wrote which served as the model for the First Amendment] ... because it throws a monkey wrench into the Christian nationalist [187] narrative, which seeks to link Christianity and national identity from the British colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth to the present.”
The third tier contained three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry. “Although category three is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions,” Clarkson explained in a later story [34]. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.’ ”
The basic structure of Project Blitz’s agenda hasn’t changed much, but its presentation has. “The 2020–2021 playbook offers slicker arguments than previous years,” Clarkson notes. “For example, they deny that they seek a theocracy, try not to be overtly Christian, present secular arguments for their legislation and attempt to give the appearance that they respect religious pluralism. But they don’t quite succeed.”
...
But the changes to this agenda weren’t limited to aesthetics. Project Blitz has been expanding into new areas in recent years too with a focus on libraries, “parental review boards”, and “critical race theory”:
...
One new bill that Clarkson draws attention to would criminalize libraries and librarians, and became infamous even before Project Blitz adopted it:The “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act [189],” introduced by then-freshman Missouri State Rep. Ben Baker [190] (R‑Neosho), ignited a state [191] and national controversy [192] in January 2020 shortly after he took office. …
His bill sought to create “parental review boards” with the authority to “convene public hearings” and restrict access to anything they deemed “age-inappropriate sexual materials.” Not only would their decisions be “final,” but the bill also prescribed fines or jail for librarians who “willingly” violated board decrees regarding what is inappropriate, and included the potential state defunding of libraries accused of violating the statute.
...
This attempted intrusion into local library politics is just one example of how Project Blitz overlaps with the new wave of white backlash under the banner of fighting “critical race theory.” For several decades, the right has repeatedly mobilized to take over nonpartisan school boards, and occasionally library boards, as a way of building grassroots power and grooming candidates for higher office. Such elections usually have low turnout and relatively little campaign organization, which makes them attractive targets for extremists running scare-tactic campaigns. The parental oversight bill takes things one step further by empowering small activist groups who invadie local government meetings, but the organizing principle is the same: Use fear and stealth to seize power, and use simulated democratic legitimacy to advance a divisive, reactionary agenda.
...
And this expansion into critical race theory and libraries is just a start. With a far right Supreme Court majority poised to give its blessings to all sorts of new Christian nationalist laws, there’s almost no limit to the range of potential issues where Project Blitz could score real legislative and judicial victories. From anti-trans legislation to abortion to anti-COVID-related bills, the range of viable fights for Project Blitz to pick just keeps expanding. Each fight strategically chosen to bring the US one step closer to a theocracy:
...
More worrisome than Project Blitz itself, Gill said, are the forces behind it. “The same forces pushing forward Project Blitz have now seized upon new issues, and they are already flooding state legislatures with dangerous model bills,” she said. “There were at least four major waves of harmful legislation propagated in 2021: anti-trans youth legislation, religious exemptions to COVID-related public health protections, broad denial-of-care bills, and bills that undermine abortion access.”Of those, she says the most dangerous element is a “renewed emphasis on Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) measures at the state level. RFRAs create a limited exemption from state laws whenever religious organizations say that their activities are burdened. RFRAs have been used to attack nondiscrimination protections, access to contraception and abortion, and even child labor laws.”
Such laws were a major focus of conservative activism during Barack Obama’s presidency, although “none were successfully passed after significant public setbacks in 2015 in states like Indiana,” Gill noted. “In the wake of the pandemic and state-imposed public health restrictions,” she said, “activists have rebranded these bills as necessary to protect churches from government overreach.” Three states — Arkansas, Montana and South Dakota — passed RFRAs this year, and we should expect to see many more coming in 2022, she warns.
...
If America’s founding was really “as pristine as the religious myth requires it to be,” Clarkson observed, “it cannot be marked by the racism and genocide that the facts of history reveal. History is thus an existential crisis for Christian nationalist beliefs. That’s why history must be revised and the evils that mark so much of our history be erased, rather than acknowledged and addressed. The attack on the straw man of CRT is of a piece with what we might call the purification of American history in the name of God’s history.”
But history and politics tend to be messy, not pure. “The Christian right, supported in part by the Project Blitz playbooks, is using — and mastering — the tools and institutions of democracy in order to erode or end them,” Clarkson said. “They know that well-organized factions can win elections, beginning with low-turnout party primaries, and that the Christian Right minority can gain the mantle of democratic legitimacy by out-organizing those of us who actually believe in it.” So it’s up to “everyone to the left of the Christian Right,” as Clarkson puts it, to mobilize for democracy.
...
“The Christian right, supported in part by the Project Blitz playbooks, is using — and mastering — the tools and institutions of democracy in order to erode or end them.”
That’s the take home lesson here. The Christian Right — which can’t really be disentangled from the corporate Right — is using its mastery of the tools and institutions of democracy to end democracy. When Michael Flynn called for “One nation under God, and one religion under God,” he wasn’t just talking to the audience in that church. He was talking to this network of theocratic power brokers. Power brokers intent on rewriting laws, the constitution, and history itself. All for the glory of God. Or, well, the glory of something [198] at least...
What’s Next for the CNP? A Nationwide Bill Mill of Voter Suppression Laws
But Project Blitz isn’t the only ongoing theocratic project. The CNP and ALEC have found a new project to go all ‘bill mill’ on: voter suppression laws. A few weeks ago, we learned about a crack team of Republican lawyers who have been secretly meeting with ALEC and working out template voter suppression laws designed for use by state legislators. Three of the five lawyers said to be spearheading this initiative are CNP members. One of them is Cleta Mitchell. Yes, Mitchell is still doing her work on behalf of the GOP despite being kicked out of her law firm for gross malpractice in relation to her baseless voter fraud claims [13]. And she’s joined by fellow CNP members J Christian Adams and Kenneth Blackwell [32] in spearheading this effort.
The two lawyers who aren’t known members CNP members are Jason Snead and Hans von Spakovksy. Snead is heading Honest Elections Project, another GOP ‘election integrity’ outfit that was set up in 2020 and busily opposing any state measures to make it easier to vote during the pandemic [199]. But while Snead may not be a CNP member, the founder of the Honest Elections Project, Leonard Leo, is both a member of the CNP [32] and a member of Opus Dei [200], which is reminder that CNP members aren’t exclusively members of the CNP. They’re going to be members of all sorts of different theocratic organizations.
And Hans von Spakovksy, one of the GOP’s longstanding voter-suppression gurus, is no stranger to this group. Recall how both Spakovsky and J Christian Adams appeared as neutral expert witnesses in the trial over a Kansas voter ID law in support of the new restrictive law. Spakovsky got called out by the judge for being highly non-neutral and basing his defense of the law on highly misleading examples and assumption. Adams was shot down in a similar way by a judge the year before, calling the expert testimony by Adams’ group “misleading” and “inaccurate” [48]. This is the crew that’s spearheading the GOP’s ongoing voter suppression efforts. Three of them CNP members and the other two CNP fellow travelers. Working side-by-side with ALEC to capture of democracy [47]:
The Guardian
The network of election lawyers who are making it harder for Americans to vote
Voting rights watchdogs have warned of a web of attorneys and groups, some who pushed Donald Trump’s big lie after the 2020 election
Peter Stone in Washington
Tue 14 Dec 2021 03.00 EST
Last modified on Tue 14 Dec 2021 14.10 ESTA powerful network of conservative election lawyers and groups with links to Donald Trump have spent millions of dollars promoting new and onerous voting laws that many battleground states such as Georgia and Texas have enacted.
The moves have prompted election and voting rights watchdogs in the US to warn about the suppression of non-white voters aimed at providing Republicans an edge in coming elections.
The lawyers and groups spearheading self-professed election integrity measures include some figures who pushed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud after the 2020 election. Key advocates include Cleta Mitchell with the Conservative Partnership institute; J Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation; Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation; Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project; and J Kenneth Blackwell with the America First Policy Institute.
These conservative outfits tout their goal as curbing significant voter fraud, despite the fact that numerous courts, the vast majority of voting experts and even former top Trump officials, such as ex-attorney general Bill Barr, concluded the 2020 elections were without serious problems.
Watchdogs say that tightening state voting laws endanger the rights of Black voters and other communities of color who historically back Democrats by creating new rules limiting absentee voting and same day registration, while imposing other voting curbs.
Among the election lawyers and groups advocating tougher voting laws, Mitchell, a veteran conservative lawyer , boasts the highest profile and has sparked the most scrutiny. She took part in the 2 January call where Trump prodded Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” about 11,780 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there. After details emerged about Mitchell’s role on the call, Foley & Lardner, where she had worked for nearly 20 years, mounted an internal review, and she resigned.
Trump’s 2 January call also spawned a criminal investigation by Georgia’s Fulton county district attorney that could create problems for Mitchell, say ex-prosecutors, and may bring scrutiny of the lawyer by the House committee looking into the 6 January Capitol attack.
Mitchell, who reportedly raised $1m to help fund a baseless investigation of Arizona’s largest county that Trump pushed aggressively, generated more controversy last month when she was named to an advisory board for the federal Election Assistance Commission with backing from her close legal ally Adams whose foundation Mitchell chairs.
Using her perch at CPI and another post with the libertarian FreedomWorks that early this year announced a seven-state drive to revamp voting laws led by Mitchell, the lawyer has helped spearhead new state election measures and block two congressional bills – the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act – which Democrats have been trying to enact to counter the wave of new state laws.
According to an October update [201] from the Brennan Center for Justice, 19 states had enacted 33 new laws this year that “will make it harder for Americans to vote”.
To press for new state voting laws, Mitchell has worked closely with some influential groups quietly backing new measures, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful and shadowy group of state legislators that historically promotes model bills where she used to be outside counsel.
At an Alec meeting on 1 December in California, Mitchell helped lead a secretive “process working group” session devoted to election and voting law changes and related matters that included several top legal allies such as Adams and Von Spakovsky, according to reports from the Center for Media and Democracy, and Documented.
Adams’ foundation, which in 2020 received about $300,000 from the Bradley Foundation, whose board includes Mitchell, has brought lawsuits to defend some of the tough new voting laws in Texas and other states.
Top funders of the right’s armada include a family foundation tied to billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Bradley Foundation, and two dark money giants, the Concord Fund and Donors Trust, according to public records.
Legal watchdogs raise strong concerns about the new laws promoted by the right in numerous states such as Georgia and Texas, and note that the arguments for changing voting rules seem rife with contradictions.
“During the 2021 legislative session, we saw anti-voter organizations push cookie-cutter legislation restricting the right to vote in legislatures across the country,” said Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
“The same language appeared in state after state without regard for the state’s particular needs. For example, strict cutbacks on access to vote by mail were introduced in states that had wholly positive vote by mail experiences in 2020,” she added.
Such complaints have not deterred the legislative blitz by Mitchell with allied lawyers and groups nationwide to change voting laws.
Mitchell declined to answer questions from the Guardian about her voting law work or the Georgia investigation, though in an interview early this year with the AP she boasted “I love legislatures and working with legislators”, and revealed that she talks to Trump “fairly frequently”, but provided no details.
Mitchell’s ties to Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, are palpable, too, including post election as a frenzied and baseless drive was under way to overturn Trump’s loss.
On 30 December, according to the Washington Post magazine, Mitchell wrote Meadows and “offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud”.
Meadows, who also has a senior post at CPI, now faces contempt charges for reneging on testifying to the House panel about the 6 January Capitol attack and earlier efforts to block Biden from taking office.
...
———-
“The lawyers and groups spearheading self-professed election integrity measures include some figures who pushed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud after the 2020 election. Key advocates include Cleta Mitchell with the Conservative Partnership institute; J Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation; Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation; Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project; and J Kenneth Blackwell with the America First Policy Institute.”
Let’s see how many CNP members we can find here spearheading this nationwide push for ‘election integrity’ measures. There’s of course Cleta Mitchell. But it also turns out J Christian Adams and J Kenneth Blackwell are CNP members too [9]. So of the five lawyers said to be spearheading this ‘election integrity’ effort nearly a year after the insurrection, we find three of them are CNP members. And one is none other than Cleta Mitchell.
And while Hans von Spakovksy may not show up on the CNP membership list, recall how both Spakovsky and J Christian Adams appeared as neutral expert witnesses in the trial over a Kansas voter ID law in support of the new restrictive law. Spakovsky got called out by the judge for being highly non-neutral and basing his defense of the law on highly misleading examples and assumption. Adams was shot down in a similar way by a judge the year before, calling the expert testimony by Adams’ group “misleading” and “inaccurate” [48]. Spakovsky has been one of the GOP’s voter-suppression and gerrymandering gurus for years [202] and even appears to be involved with the origins of the “ItalyGate” bonkers conspiracy theory about Italy sattelites changing the 2020 vote tallies [49].
Similarly, while Snead may not be a direct CNP member, the founder of his Honest Elections Project, Leonard Leo [199], is indeed a CNP member [9].
And note how Spakovksy, Adams, and Mitchell were all at a secret December 1, 2021, ALEC “process working group” session devoted to election and voting law changes and related matters. These three figures constitute the legal core of the GOP’s fraudulent ‘voter fraud’ campaign, and here they are secretly strategizing with ALEC:
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Mitchell, who reportedly raised $1m to help fund a baseless investigation of Arizona’s largest county that Trump pushed aggressively, generated more controversy last month when she was named to an advisory board for the federal Election Assistance Commission with backing from her close legal ally Adams whose foundation Mitchell chairs.Using her perch at CPI and another post with the libertarian FreedomWorks that early this year announced a seven-state drive to revamp voting laws led by Mitchell, the lawyer has helped spearhead new state election measures and block two congressional bills – the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act – which Democrats have been trying to enact to counter the wave of new state laws.
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To press for new state voting laws, Mitchell has worked closely with some influential groups quietly backing new measures, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful and shadowy group of state legislators that historically promotes model bills where she used to be outside counsel.
At an Alec meeting on 1 December in California, Mitchell helped lead a secretive “process working group” session devoted to election and voting law changes and related matters that included several top legal allies such as Adams and Von Spakovsky, according to reports from the Center for Media and Democracy, and Documented.
Adams’ foundation, which in 2020 received about $300,000 from the Bradley Foundation, whose board includes Mitchell, has brought lawsuits to defend some of the tough new voting laws in Texas and other states.
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That’s what’s next for this movement. More of the same, but worse. More voter suppression laws. More Project Blitz initiatives and gaslighting the public about the threats of CRT and trans youth. And more calls by figures like Michael Flynn for a merger of church and state.
But let’s not kid ourselves. You can’t have a fascist theocratic movement operate in ‘more of the same, but worse’ mode indefinitely. At some point its going to be ‘more of the same, and now we’re a theocracy’. How soon we get there depends on a number of factors. But perhaps the biggest factor is the gross abandonment of faith in democracy as a institution on the part of conservative voters. In other words, how long does it take before all of the right-wing propaganda designed to undermine faith in democracy — whether its disinformation about mass voter fraud or QAnon-style conspiracy theories about Satanic liberal elites — finally takes hold and there’s no longer a conservative appetite for sharing power? How many more years of unyielding gaslighting and disinformation can pass before the American electorate simply doesn’t care anymore if elections are held at all? Don’t forget that climate change and the existential despair of ecological collapse are going to playing out too. The politics of despair is a natural fit for an End Times theology. And when the public does finally reach that state of civic capitulation, what are the odds they won’t run into the arms of charismatic theocrats waiting to channel all of that confusion and angst? These are the kinds of questions the United States is effectively asking itself. How much longer before a large enough chunk of the US electorate is convinced that democracy is doomed and some sort theocracy is the only path to salvation? That’s the question the US is effectively asking itself these days.
But as we’ve seen, when it comes to the right-wing oligarchy, it’s not really a question of whether or not they would prefer a theocracy. The profound influence of the CNP makes that answer abundantly clear...as long as its a corporatist theocracy. Instead, it’s just a question of how much more effort do groups like the CNP and Project Blitz have to invest before their vision is made manifest. Will the oligarchy get a majority of the public to support its theocracy? We’ll see, but let’s not forget that public approval is kind of beside the point under this post-democratic version of Heaven on Earth [203].