Make no mistake, Alabamans know full well who they’re trying to elect to the Senate, and what he’s supposed to do there, which is nothing short of furthering a dominionist takeover already planned by Mike Pence and company. Pence made the now-famous statement at the Republican convention in 2016 that he was, “A Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third.” May one infer, and an American fourth? If at all? In any event, Mike Pence laid his cards on the table. He’s a theocrat that Blackwater mercenary, fellow gay-basher, and brother to Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince, bought and paid for many years back. Pence is at the top of the dominionist food chain.
Now the newest talent on the dominionist, or “evangelical Christian,” bench is Alabama senate hopeful Roy Moore. He’s considerably more sinister than Mike Pence and that’s saying a mouthful. Moore has a neo-confederate secessionist sugar daddy named Michael Peroutka, who not only funds Moore but has political ambitions of his own. Peroutka belongs to a secretive group, a la the movie, “Eyes Wide Shut,” called the Council for National Policy (CNP), a group with a membership roster you won’t believe. Suffice it to say that the main cog in the wheel is none other than poster child of evil Steve Bannon and the cast of characters includes not only the guy who swift-boated John Kerry, but Breitbart contributor and Mike Pence benefactor Erik Prince. If your conspiracy theory buzzer just went off, pause it while you take a look at what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about this:
The CNP [Council for National Policy] is an intensely secretive and shadowy group of what The New York Times once described as “the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It is so tight-lipped that it tells people not to admit their membership or even name the group. Revealing when or where the group meets, or what it discusses, is also forbidden. The organization, which can only be joined by invitation and at a cost of thousands of dollars, strives mightily to keep its membership rolls secret.
They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.
As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”
The SPLC also opined that in this time of extreme political polarization Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future. Who is Roy Moore mixing with? A neo-confederate secessionist evangelical who considers “Dixie” to be the true national anthem, and who is serious as a heart attack about starting an armed conflict, if necessary, so that a white “Christian” nation may inherit the earth. Talking Points Memo:
“Of course the South is this remnant of a Christian understanding of law and government where there is a God and government is God-ordained. That stands right in the way of this pagan understanding that the state, the new world order, is God,'” he [Peroutka] continued, warning that secularists were out to destroy the South. [...]
But even by the old standards, Moore’s deep ties to Peroutka — and Peroutka’s views — stand out, as most of those groups weren’t actively calling for the South to secede again.
Peroutka, a 2004 Constitution Party presidential nominee who in 2014 won a seat as a Republican on the county commission in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, spent years on the board of the Alabama-based League of the South, a southern secessionist group which for years has called for a southern nation run by an “Anglo-Celtic” elite. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the League of the South as a hate group (a designation Peroutka regularly jokes about). That organization, after Peroutka left, was one of the organizers of the Charlottesville protests last summer that ended in bloodshed.
Roy Moore has some interesting ideas about interior decoration, as his office is adorned with a portrait of Jefferson Davis and busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. When queried, Moore responds that the factor of commonality is that they’re all West Point graduates, as is he, not confederate leaders (as is he.) Make of that what you will. If there’s any question in your mind but that Moore is ready to get militant, if need be, to bring about the aforementioned Anglo-Celtic Christian nation, read this gem that my friend and our fellow kossack praesepe found in the Baltimore City Paper, which inspired this piece:
Peroutka, a highly successful debt-collection attorney whose brother and law partner Stephen Peroutka is a board member of the Babe Ruth Museum, also is white, smart, and rich, but it’s doubtful that many of his potential constituents have used their advantages in the way he long has: to advance a militant theocratic agenda.
A decade ago, Peroutka already had a record of supporting the formation of local militias when he ran for U.S. president under the Constitution Party banner, with a campaign slogan—“God-Family-Republic”—that dressed up his extremism with rhetoric that run-of-the-mill patriotic Christians might find innocuously attractive. Similarly, the name of Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution (IOTC) fails to communicate its actual mission: creating theocratic governance based on both testaments of the Bible, similar to how extremist Muslims would like to establish states based on Shariah law derived from the Quran.
For the moment, put a placecard on this concept of extremism and militancy. Take a look at the effect on the GOP recently when Roy Moore beat Luther Strange and see where that defeat fits into the larger picture of Republican politics — the same exact place where Michael Peroutka fits in:
And clearly, some of the drivers of mainstream GOP thinking find Peroutka to be a philosophical pariah. In February, when Peroutka's name was being bandied about as a possible GOP candidate for Maryland attorney general, Mark Newgent penned a blog at Red Maryland pointing out that Peroutka is an avowed Christian Reconstructionist. This God's-law-reigns-supreme approach was birthed by Rousas Rushdoony, and Newgent summed up its goal: "a civil government whose first duty is to carry out a religious mandate to do what God requires as written in the Old Testament, including executions for adulterers and homosexuals."
Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson has called Peroutka a "wackypants anti-gay crusader," and on his Free State Notes blog in June he wrote that Peroutka's IOTC "promotes a deeply erroneous view of the U.S. Constitution as an essentially religious document." And in pointing out that the man is stridently anti-Republican, Olson quoted a Peroutka screed from last fall imploring "anyone, including those who identify with the 'Tea Party,' who loves America and desires real reform" to "disengage themselves from the Republican Party and their brand of worthless, Godless, unprincipled conservatism."
This is a war that is going on simultaneously on a lot of different fronts. Moore/Peroutka/Bannon are devoted to blowing up the GOP and establishing an all white Anglo-Celtic nation. Go back to the seminal place where all the dots converge, which is the Council for National Policy. That’s where the veils drop and it all begins to gel and get scary:
But what is most remarkable about the directory is that it reveals how the CNP has become a key meeting place where ostensibly mainstream conservatives interact with individuals who are, by any reasonable definition, genuinely extremist.
Tony Perkins is a good example. He has falsely claimed that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” said that gay people “recruit” children, secretly purchased a mailing list for a candidate he was managing from former Klan leader David Duke, and addressed, in 2001, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (the same group that inspired Dylann Roof’s murder of nine churchgoers last year).
Those are not the only wealthy people associated with CNP. Its past presidents, in particular, include many extremely well off businessmen. Among them are Nelson Bunker Hunt; Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway whose net worth was estimated at $5 billion in 2012; and Foster Friess, a stock picker who was recognized in 2011 for contributions exceeding $1 million to the right-wing funding apparatus started by brothers Charles and David Koch. Friess is notorious for throwing himself an almost $8 million birthday party and saying on TV that women used to avoid pregnancy by putting a Bayer aspirin “between their knees.”
Other past presidents include Tim LaHaye, [”Left Behind”] one of CNP’s original founders; Edwin Meese, a right-wing California lawyer who rose to become the nation’s attorney general under President Ronald Reagan; and Pat Robertson, the far-right Christian activist who started the Christian Coalition and similar groups and who pushed theories of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy in one of his books.
Pat Robertson is key. If this doesn’t persuade you that this is real, nothing will.
“During the 1980’s I began taping and transcribing Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show because of the alarming anti-Christian political philosophy he was endorsing. He began a drum beat for drastic political and cultural changes to this country.
Robertson’s guests did something I’d never seen before: they reversed the scriptures and called it immoral for the citizens to help the poor through taxation, which, by the way is expressly required in the Old Testament. The accusation was and is that taxation robbed the rich to help the poor.
If you are interested in how the movement reversed Judeo-Christian standards, see Bloodguilty Churches (which is also available at Amazon.com).
Robertson slowly introduced the idea of an American empire; he attacked pluralism, and pleaded that the people of the U.S. “must speak with one voice.” (7/19/85)
The idea of taking over and controlling the United States government began with a series of guest appearances:
On April 4, 1985, Billy Graham appeared on the show, and in a startling announcement said, “I’m for evangelicals “… getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government. If we leave it to the other side we’re going to be lost.”
On September 25, 1985, Tim LaHaye, appeared in a film clip with Phyllis Schlafly on the show. In that clip, he laid out the plan to take over the government of the United States. He said:
“Suppose that every Bible believing church—all 110,000—decided to…raise up one person to run for public office and win… If every church in the next ten years did that, we would have more Christians in office than there are positions…there are only 97,000 elective offices.”
Though the idea of right-wing religious conservatives controlling the U.S. government appeared to be a pipedream to most observers I talked with, for the churchgoers who were listening—and by 1985 Robertson’s 700 Club topped the Nielsen ratings with a projected monthly viewing audience of 28.7 million viewers—to those viewers—the idea of gaining and holding the power in this country was a tantalizing and intriguing concept—they began to accept the idea of dominating America step by step, day by day.”
The last tile you need to slip into the mosaic, and then your picture will be complete, is Erik Prince. Erik Prince visited the Seychelles Islands in January to meet with a representative of Vladimir Putin, one of many meetings he made as an unofficial representative of the United States — yet neither Russia nor the Emirates where he had these meetings ever questioned his authority for a moment. Let that one sink in.
The whole roster is accounted for, Prince, Pence, DeVos, Bannon, Koch, and just because they’re new to the national spotlight doesn’t mean that they haven’t been there all along, Peroutka and Roy Moore. Plus Steve Bannon is encouraging Prince, America’s most controversial mercenary to make a run for the US Senate in the State of Wyoming, toppling GOP old guard Senator John Barrasso - as part of Bannon’s “insurgent” campaign to replace the GOP with a party of his own personal vision — and that of Robert and Rebekah Mercer.
So if you’ve been connecting all the dots 1. There is a shadow group of conservatives and crazies who meet regularly to decide the cliched, but nevertheless quite real “new world order” which they intend to implement; 2. Roy Moore and his group of backers, chiefly Michael Perouta, are militants who want to found an all white Anglo-Celtic Christian nation, and if they have to do it violently, then by God that’s how it will be; 3. Steve Bannon may be out of the White House, but like Anakin Skywalker embracing the Dark Side his powers have only increased and he’s hell bent on tearing down the established GOP in a nationwide insurgent campaign; 4. Infamous Blackwater mercenary and Mike Pence bankroller Erik Prince is on board to help with all this, and he wants to be a United States Senator as well. Erik Prince is quite the chess player. He picked up pawn Mike Pence when he was hosting a talk show at a teakettle station in Rushville, Indiana after two failed attempts at running for congress and now he’s transmuted Pence into a bishop, in this particular game. If he can make him King he will.
If all this doesn’t scare the hell out of you, check to see if you’re in a coma.