“the council has deservedly attained the reputation for conceiving and promoting the ideas of many who in fact do want to control everything in the world” — ABC news, 2002
Back in 2011, a gang of mainstream media pundits (such as Ross Douthat, Michael Gerson, Mark Pinsky, Lisa Miller, and others) launched an all-out effort to poo-pooh (see 1, 2, 3, 4) reporting, especially from the website I co-founded in 2005 with Frederick Clarkson, concerning ties between various GOP presidential hopefuls (such as Rick Perry) in the 2012 election and the movement referred to as “dominionism”.
Another term for “dominionism” is “Christian supremacy” ; it’s a tendency on the spectrum that runs towards theocracy.
Now, the dominionists are running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
As it happens, Donald Trump has just appointed Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to head his faltering presidential campaign.
Both are listed 2014 members of the most powerful and influential dominionist organization in America, the Council For National Policy.
We know this because, conveniently (for secular America at least ), last May 2016 the Southern Poverty Law Center made public an official 2014 membership directory of the secretive, far right, dominionist Council For National Policy.
It was a startling intelligence coup — for years, fragmentary lists of the CNP had sporadically emerged. Now, here it was — the official CNP handbook.
While Bannon was just a CNP member, Conway was listed as being a member of the CNP Executive Committee.
Joining her in that august group were Kenneth Blackwell, Tony Perkins of the (virulently antigay) Family Research Council and reigning matriarch of the religious right Phyllis Schafly — who helped kick start the movement in the early 1970s with her scorched-earth campaign to stop the Equal Rights Amendment.
As the SPLC describes of the CNP membership list featured in the booklet,
“The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party enthusiasts — but for the many real extremists who are included.”
Close religious right observer Sarah Posner covered the CNP in this useful Alternet story on the group. To get a sense of what’s discussed at CNP meetings, click on the various meeting descriptions at this CNP website page.
In October 2015, a number of 2016 election GOP nominee contenders addressed the CNP. Donald Trump, it seems, was not invited. But now the CNP is running his presidential bid.
Here’s what ABC news said of the CNP, in a hard-hitting 2002 story:
“When Steve Baldwin, the executive director of an organization with the stale-as-old-bread name of the Council for National Policy, boasts that "we control everything in the world," he is only half-kidding.
Half-kidding, because the council doesn't really control the world. The staff of about eight, working in a modern office building in Fairfax, Va., isn't even enough for a real full-court basketball game.
But also half-serious because the council has deservedly attained the reputation for conceiving and promoting the ideas of many who in fact do want to control everything in the world.”
While the relatively few mainstream media and alternative media covers of the CNP have typically described the group as merely “conservative”, that hardly sums things up.
Over the years, these would-be masters of the world have included a number of leaders from the Christian Reconstructionism movement who advocate the imposition of strict biblical law including execution for adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, and witchcraft (and a much longer list of offenses).
In effect, the CNP is command central for the culture wars that have since the mid 1970s wracked America ; it is the organizational center for a movement engaged in a slow-motion “soft revolution” to “reclaim” America and return it to its alleged “Judeo-Christian” roots.
The time is long overdue for mainstream media to stop pooh-poohing this movement ; especially because that crass dereliction of journalistic duty has helped pave the way for the rise of Donald Trump.
And, in the event Trump loses, that will not be the end, nor will he be the last “Trump” to plague national politics.
The CNP will continue, and it will orchestrate an attempted replay of the 2010 election, when the Tea Party movement helped power the Republican recapture of the House of Representatives.
Further, there will be more Trumps to come, now that The Donald has established the electoral power of the brand of populist paleoconsrvatism pioneered by Pat Buchanan in the ‘92, ‘’96, and 2000 elections. The future Trumps will triangulate on less abrasive style - more refined, more effective, even more deadly to pluralist democracy.
You heard it here first.
