Council For National Policy & Media
COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY AND MEDIA
This section contains a compiled listing of significant media organizations directly associated with prominent Council for National Policy members. Each individual section covers the role played of the organization or person and a detailed history of their involvement and significance. It has been quite the task to put this together so far. There is a lot of cross over with the sources of financing these outlets with many think tanks and right-wing activist non profit organizations as you might well imagine in these networks. In 2016 Robert Mercer played a significant role in the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Prior to that, key infrastructure of the pro-business right was financed by the Sun Myung Moon, the Koch brothers, the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife. In the 2024 election cycle Scaife's relative Timothy Mellon was the largest donor to Donald Trump.
The focus on the types of media in this instance is traditional (television, radio, newspapers, magazines) and popular websites.
Pat Robertson, founder of The Christian Broadcasting Network and significant figure in the Council for National Policy.
CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING NETWORK
Prior to the 1980s, there was no shortage of religious programming on the airwaves, but most of it was broadcast on commercial stations amid other offerings. Religious radio was not a world unto itself. CBN's broadcasting subsidiary, the Continental Broadcasting Network, ran its four over-the-air outlets as family-oriented independent stations – featuring a mix of religious programming (which took up most of its stations' Sunday schedules) and secular acquired programs, including westerns, sitcoms, drama series and children's programming.
The CBN Satellite Service became the CBN Cable Network on September 1, 1981, and adopted a more secular programming format featuring a mix of family-oriented series and films while retaining some religious programs from various televangelists (mirroring the format used by CBN's broadcast stations). Its carriage grew to 10.9 million homes with a cable television subscription. The channel was notable for being one of the first cable channels to distribute its signal across the United States through satellite transmission. CBN Cable Network began airing a late night block of classic family oriented shows like You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx, I Married Joan, and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
With the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 deregulating the cable television industry, and with the Fairness Doctrine being abolished in 1987, eliminating the requirement that licensed broadcasters provide balanced coverage of public affairs evangelicals could own their own networks. Cable provided the beginnings of that opportunity, with Pat Robertson turning his small Virginia based Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) into a satellite-based cable channel in 1977. CBN sought to end the Fairness Doctrine and lifting of ownership limits. Some have interpreted the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine as President Reagan's reward to evangelicals for their support; it permitted demonization of homosexuality, abortion and feminism without a response.
On January 8, 1990, the national TV network was sold to related entity International Family Entertainment (IFE). IFE was majority owned by the Robertson family, with a minority interest held by John C. Malone.
Robertson was a governing member of the Council for National Policy (CNP) and served on its Board of Governors in 1982, was the President of its Executive Committee from 1985 to 1986, and a listed member in 1984, 1988, and 1998.
Many of the early powerful figures in the CNP were involved in covert operations in Central America and Iran Contra. During the Reagan administration Harry C. Aderholt was part of the Singlaub panel at the Pentagon that was set up to devise new counterinsurgency strategies in developing countries, that were implemented in El Salvador and claimed that CBN had given the Knights of Malta $2 million to finance their death squad operations in Central America.
The CNP was a powerhouse of support behind the Reagan administration and powerful base for the Religious Right politically. This provided the opportunity for Robertson to announce his intention to succeed Ronald Reagan by seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States. His well-funded campaign was unsuccessful and Vice President Bush won the nomination.
Robertson used the remainder of his campaign resources to jump-start the formation of the Christian Coalition's voter-mobilization effort. Americans for Robertson accumulated a mailing list of several million conservative Christians interested in politics. This mailing provided the basis of the new organization.
As a commentator and minister, Robertson's statements frequently generated controversy.
Robertson's service as a minister included the belief in the healing power of God. He cautioned believers that some Protestant denominations may harbor the spirit of the Antichrist; denounced Hinduism as "demonic" and Islam as "Satanic".
Robertson denounced left-wing views of feminism, activism regarding homosexuality, abortion, and liberal college professors. Critics claim Robertson had business dealings in Africa with former president of Liberia and convicted war criminal Charles Taylor, and former Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko, both of whom had been globally denounced for claims of human rights violations. Robertson was criticized worldwide for his call for Hugo Chávez's assassination, and for his remarks concerning Ariel Sharon's ill health as an act of God..
During the week of September 11, 2001, Robertson interviewed Jerry Falwell, who expressed his own opinion that "the ACLU has to take a lot of blame for this" in addition to "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians [who have] helped [the terror attacks of September 11th happen." Robertson replied, "I totally concur". Both evangelists were seriously criticized by President George W. Bush for their comments, for which Falwell later issued an apology.
Less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836 people, Robertson implied on the September 12, 2005, broadcast of The 700 Club that the storm was God's punishment in response to America's abortion policy. He suggested that the September 11 attacks and the disaster in New Orleans "could [...] be connected in some way".
In 2009, Robertson said that Islam is "a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination". He went on to elaborate that "you're dealing with not a religion, you're dealing with a political system, and I think we should treat it as such, and treat its adherents as such as we would members of the communist party, members of some fascist group".
Robertson's response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake also sparked worldwide condemnation. Robertson claimed that Haiti's founders had sworn a "pact to the Devil" in order to liberate themselves from the French slave owners and indirectly attributed the earthquake to the consequences of the Haitian people being "cursed" for doing so. CBN later issued a statement saying that Robertson's comments "were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French". Various figures in mainline and evangelical Christianity have on occasion disavowed some of Robertson's remarks.
In March 2015, Robertson compared Buddhism to a disease on The 700 Club. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative Christian watchdog group Robertson founded to promote Christian prayer in public schools, called for a multi-pronged attack on mindfulness programs because "they appear to be similar to Buddhist religious practices. Proponents of secular mindfulness say mindfulness is not a Buddhist practice; it is a contemplative practice used in religious traditions around the world by many different names."
Robertson blamed the forced resignation of President Trump's National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on "left-wingers and so-called progressives" in the federal government, whom he accused of trying to destroy the country and "revolting against what God's plan is for America."
He also suggested that members of the U.S. intelligence services committed a federal crime by listening in on a 29 December 2016 phone conversation between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Robertson made the charges during a 15 February 2017 broadcast of The 700 Club in which he cited Bible passages in an effort to equate opposition to President Trump with disobedience to God:
During the Trump administration (2017–2021), CBN hosted events at Trump properties, paying at least $170,000. Subsequently, CBN obtained access to the White House that far larger news outlets typically received, and were given frequent exclusive interviews with senior administration staff, including Trump himself.
Before the 2020 election, Robertson Robertson said on Tuesday that God told him President Trump will win, and more than five years later an asteroid will hit Earth and “maybe” bring “the end.”
“First of all, I want to say without question, Trump is going to win the election,’’ Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network told “The 700 Club.”
“That doesn’t mean you sit home and don’t vote,” he added. “That means you get out and do everything you can to work, but he’s going to win. That’s, I think, a given.”
The 90-year-old forecasted disaster for the country and the world after the election, including civil unrest, at least two attempts on Trump’s life and a war against Israel that will be “put down by God.”
Then, the world will see “at least five years or more of extraordinary peace” before a devastating asteroid strike.
On June 8, 2023, Robertson died at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the age of 93.
Please watch Expose The Enemy's series The Religious Right Revealed for more information below.
FORBES, INC.
Forbes is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917 and owned by Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, and its CEO is Mike Federle. It is based in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The myth of the "free market" dominates the articles published by Forbes. The outlet has been one of the main and consistent disseminater of corporate propaganda and disinformation.
Forbes brazenly publishes articles from the likes of Alejandro Chafuen, a proud member of the Mont Perelin Society and Atlas Netwok. Key Mont Perelin Society members were instrumental in the Free Market Project and the rise of neoliberalism.
Despite the impression they'd like you to have of them, Forbes doesn't have a great tracked record.. Silicon Valley Bank made Forbes’s annual list of America’s Best Banks (for a fifth consecutive year) just a week before it was shut down by regulators.
The outlet is so eager to promote their pro-capitalist propaganda and/or take great delight in the rich bilking the middle class, they have promoted the scams of some of the most notorious fraudsters. Aiding and abetting in popularizing these scams. Elizabeth Holmes dubbed by the media as 'The Next Steve Jobs' is one such 'entrepreneur' championed by Forbes.
After Holmes' Theranos was revealed to be huge con job, rather than just call this scam artist out and report on how the system they champion failed to protect investors, Forbes used a weasel word salad to describe the situation 'Elizabeth Holmes's Theranos saga is a study of Silicon Valley's startup playbook as it was misapplied to deep tech-innovation.' Their reluctance to admit the true nature of the situation may be due to Forbes plastering Holmes on their magazine cover. Forbes also has a stubborn unwillingness to accept that they aren't reliable or credible. Whether that is due to their own incompetence from a lack of journalistic due diligence and oversight are detailed they are not forthcoming with..
Reading Forbes you could doubt the fact that Wall Street is full of dubious characters from cut throat opportunists, manipulators, social climbers, soulless sociopaths and egomaniacs. Those characterizations could all be used to describe Sam Bankman-Fried who was also featured on the cover of Forbes magazine.
SBF founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for cryptocurrency, with FTX having a global reach with more than 130 international affiliates. Forbes presented SBF as the type of person readers should aspire to be like. was convicted of seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. On March 28, 2024, SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion His trial was one of the most notorious cases of white-collar crime in the United States.
STEVE FORBES
Steve Forbes was born Malcom 'Steve' Forbes, Jr. on July 18, 1947, in Morristown, NJ, the son of wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes.
After graduating from Princeton in 1970, Steve Forbes joined the family business. Eventually, he become President and CEO of Forbes, Inc. and President and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Magazine. In 1996 and 2000, Forbes entered the GOP presidential primaries, with his family fortune giving him instant political credibility. In 1996, he lost the nomination to Bob Dole and withdrew from the race in February 2000.
According to his official biographical note "in both 1996 and 2000, Mr. Forbes campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Key to his platform were a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system for working Americans, parental choice of schools for their children, term limits and a strong national defense." Mr. Forbes continues to promote this oligarch friendly agenda.
According to his biographical note, "he graduated cum laude in 1966 from Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. in history from Princeton in 1970. At Princeton, he was the founding editor of Business Today, which became the country's largest magazine published by students for students, with a circulation of 200,000. The magazine continues to be published today by Princeton undergraduates."
"Forbes was the Honorary Chairman of Americans for Hope, Growth and Opportunity (1996-1999), a grassroots, issues advocacy organization founded to advance pro-growth, pro-freedom and pro-family issues."
He served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Empower America, a political reform organization founded by Jack Kemp, William J. Bennett, and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick from December 1993 until June 1996.
He serves on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University, as well as on other boards, including The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, and the National Taxpayers Union. His name has been associated with the Project for the New American Century. He is also on the Board of Overseers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is also on the National Advisory Council for the Free Enterprise Foundation. He is also on the board of trustees of Freedom House.
"In 1985, President Reagan named Mr. Forbes Chairman of the bi-partisan Board for International Broadcasting (BIB). Mr. Forbes was reappointed to his post by President George H. W. Bush and served until 1993. In both 1996 and 2000, Mr. Forbes campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency."
Speaking in Sydney in January 2003, Forbes praised the tort reform - "law abuse" as he referred to it - efforts of the New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr. Changes in Texas, Forbes said, had forced trial lawyers to "flee like rats to Oklahoma" and other states that haven't embraced tort reform.
On Saturday March 6, 2004, Forbes will be a keynote speaker via video conference to the right wing New Zealand Political party, ACT (the acronym for Association of Consumers and Taxpayers).
Steve Forbes:
In 2008 Forbes became a special economic adviser to John McCain. Forbes gave an interview to NPR stating that the government must take emergency steps to save the economy, like buying up troubled mortgages and purchasing stock in financial firms. Ironically, the episode is called 'How Capitalism Will Save Us'.
Affiliations
Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
American Enterprise Institute
National Taxpayers Union
Project for the New American Century
Freedom House
Advisory Board, World Growth
Campaign donors for 2000 presidential hopeful Steve Forbes listed by the Eagle List Company included Citizens United and the American Sovereignty Project.
Forbes is on the board of governors of the Council for National Policy.
BREITBART NEWS
Breitbart News Network is an American far-right syndicated news, opinion, and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Its content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. The site has published a number of conspiracy theories and intentionally misleading stories. Posts originating from the Breitbart News Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.
Breitbart News Network really got its start in Jerusalem. It was the summer of 2007, and Andrew had been invited to tour Israel as part of a media junket.. Initially conceived as "the Huffington Post of the right", Breitbart News later aligned with the alt-right, the European populist right, and the pan-European nationalist identitarian movement under the management of former executive chairman Steve Bannon, who declared the website "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016. Breitbart News became a virtual rallying spot for supporters of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The company's management, together with former staff member Milo Yiannopoulos, solicited ideas for stories from, and worked to advance and market ideas of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and individuals. After the election, more than 2,000 organizations removed Breitbart News from ad buys following Internet activism campaigns denouncing the site's controversial positions. Breitbart News has promoted climate change denial and COVID-19 misinformation.
The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, with bureaus in Texas, London, and Jerusalem. Co-founder Larry Solov is the co-owner (along with Andrew Breitbart's widow Susie Breitbart and the Mercer family) and CEO, while Alex Marlow is the editor-in-chief, Wynton Hall is managing editor, and Joel Pollak and Peter Schweizer are senior editors-at-large.
Breitbart News Network really got its start in Jerusalem. It was the summer of 2007, and Andrew had been invited to tour Israel as part of a media junket.
STEVE BANNON
Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker. He served as the White House's chief strategist for the first seven months of U.S. president Donald Trump's first administration, before Trump discharged him. He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News and previously served on the board of the now-defunct data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy from 1977 to 1983, after which he worked for two years at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2. He was an executive producer on 18 Hollywood films from 1991 to 2016. In 2007, he co-founded Breitbart News.
He became Breitbart Executive Chairman following the untimely death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012. Bannon took the helm during a key transformation period with Republicans. out of power. Breitbart was a key outlet in promoting anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and anti-China propaganda as well as other wedge issues commonly presented as populist ideas that aligned strongly with the Tea Party, Ron Paul libertarians and John Birchers. Under Bannon's leadership, Breitbart also aligned with the rising alt-right, the European populist right, Duginists, and the pan-European nationalist identitarian movement and channeled all of these groups into Trump's Make America Great Again movement.
In 2016, Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and was appointed chief strategist and senior Counselor to the President following Trump's election. He left the position eight months later and rejoined Breitbart. In January 2018, after his criticism of Trump's children was reported in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, he was disavowed by Trump and subsequently left Breitbart.
After leaving the White House, Bannon opposed the Republican Party establishment and supported insurgent candidates in Republican primary elections known as MAGA candidates. Bannon's reputation as a political strategist was questioned when former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, despite Bannon's support, lost in the face of allegations of pedophilia.
Bannon had declared his intention to become "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement". Accordingly, he has supported many national populist conservative political movements around the world, including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe.
Bannon's key involvement in the global populist movement has been covered in a podcast series here.
Cambridge Analytica - Facebook scandal
Bannon served as vice president of the board of Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm owned largely by the Mercer family and a subsiduary of SCL Group. Robert Mercer also co-owns Breitbart News and Trump mega donor; the firm allegedly used illegal tactics to target American voters in the 2016 election. According to former Analytica employee Christopher Wylie, Bannon oversaw the collection of Facebook data which was used to target American voters. Wylie who helped with creation of the company referred to the company as a "psychological warfare tool". Bannon was paid more than $125,000 for his work at Cambridge Analytica. Bannon's stake in Cambridge Analytica was estimated at $1–5 million, but he sold his stake in the company once he joined the Trump administration in April 2017.
Defrauding We Build the Wall Donors
In August 2020, Bannon and three others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. According to the grand jury indictment, Bannon and the defendants promised that all contributions would go to building a U.S.–Mexico border wall, but instead enriched themselves. Bannon pleaded not guilty. On January 20, 2021, on his last day in office, Trump pardoned Bannon, sparing him from a federal trial. Federal pardons do not cover state offenses, and in September 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court on counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection with the campaign.
Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, the U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the 2021 United States Capitol attack. He was subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury on two criminal charges of contempt of Congress. In July 2022, he was convicted on both counts in a jury trial. He was sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine. After losing his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bannon surrendered to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he was imprisoned July 1 – October 29, 2024.
Russia investigation
Bannon was interviewed multiple times by Robert Mueller as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. Bannon was reportedly interviewed about Roger Stone's contact with WikiLeaks. In November 2019, Bannon gave evidence in the federal criminal trial of Roger Stone. Bannon did not voluntarily testify; rather, he was compelled to give evidence under subpoena. Bannon testified that Stone was WikiLeaks' access point for the Trump campaign; the testimony helped establish that Stone lied to Congress. Stone was subsequently convicted on all charges (lying to Congress and witness tampering), but on July 10, 2020, his federal prison sentence was commuted by President Trump. Asked for a comment after Bannon himself was arrested on August 20, 2020, Stone replied, "Karma is a bitch. But I am praying for him."
In August 2020, members of the Senate intelligence committee told the Department of Justice (DOJ) that they believed that Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. may have misled them with their testimony about Russia investigation.
Bannon has been listed as a member of the Council for National Policy.
ROBERT MERCER
Robert Leroy Mercer (born July 11, 1946) is an American hedge fund manager, computer scientist, and political donor. Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.
Mercer played a controversial role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, led by Dominic Cummings, with £3.9 million being spent on his data analytics and machine learning company AggregateIQ. He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, American Crossroads, Council for National Policy, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.
Mercer joined the Koch brothers’ conservative political donor network after the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC, but Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, decided to establish their own political foundation. The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah, has donated to a variety of conservative causes.
In November 2017, Mercer announced he would step down from Renaissance Technologies and sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters. He was the majority owner of SCL Group, a self-described "global elections management agency", before it was dissolved in 2018. In 2021, Mercer was involved in possibly the largest tax settlement in U.S. history, as he, James Simons, and other executives at the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies were ordered to pay as much as $7 billion to the IRS in back taxes.
Brexit
Mercer was an activist in the campaign for the United Kingdom to end its membership of the European Union, also known as Brexit. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, said that Mercer donated the services of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people's Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit. It has been reported that Cambridge Analytica also has undisclosed links to Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ, which also played a pivotal role in Dominic Cummings' Vote Leave campaign, where he delivered an estimated one billion individually curated targeted adverts to voters in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, in contravention of established voting rules. Neither Vote Leave nor Leave.EU informed the UK electoral commission of the donation despite the fact that a law demands that all donations valued over £7,500 must be reported. In 2018, the Electoral Commission found the Vote Leave campaign guilty of breaking electoral law.
JD Vance
Mercer's family donated an undisclosed amount to the super PAC Protect Ohio Values which was established to support JD Vance for his 2022 election to a Senate seat in Ohio. After Mercer support for Parler beginning in 2018, Vance, who founded Narya Capital, allegedly provided advice concerning Parler to Mercer's daughter Rebekah.
Race relations
Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists.
Mercer has been listed as a member of the Council for National Policy.
A 2010 billboard displayed in South Gate, California, questioning the validity of Barack Obama's birth certificate and by extension his eligibility to serve as President of the U.S. The billboard was part of an advertising campaign by WorldNetDaily, whose web address appears on the billboard's bottom right corner.
WORLDNETDAILY
WND (formerly WorldNetDaily) is an American far-right news and opinion website. It is known for promoting fake news and conspiracy theories, including the false claim that former President Barack Obama was born outside the United States.
In 1997, Joseph Farah created the news website WorldNetDaily as a division of the Western Journalism Center. It was subsequently spun off in 1999 as a for-profit organization. with the backing of $4.5 million from investors, Farah owning a majority of the stock.
Building off the familiar 'Judeo-Christian values' spiel, WND launched into the whole 'War On Christmas' hysteria. while selling “Christmas Defense Kits” for profit, that included a bumper sticker reading, “This is America! And I’m going to say it: Merry Christmas!” This type of rhetoric has helped to promote the mythical persecution within the religious right resulting in a reactionary victim mentality contributing to the rise of the theocratic Chrsitian Nationalist movement. A vision for the United States that the founders of the CNP sought to fulfil.
WND has published hundreds of articles promoting "birther" conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, for which it has gained notoriety. It has falsely claimed that Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen and thus is not eligible to serve as president. After the 2008 presidential campaign, WND began an online petition to have Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate released to the public and Farah offered a $15,000 award for its release. The website also unsuccessfully urged Supreme Court justices to hear several lawsuits aiming to release Obama's birth certificate. The White House released copies of the president's original long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011. After the long-form birth certificate was released, Farah refused to pay the promised award and WND continued to promote its conspiracy theory, publishing an article questioning the certificate's authenticity.
Off the back of the popularity of the 'birtherism' conspiracy theories WND bankrolled populist Tea Party conferences such as "Taking America Back” at these events many of the speakers worked for WND. So, it is no surprise that the events mirrored much of the narratives pushed by WND. The prominent one at the time was that then President Obama was a communist.
WND was a key driver of the Tea Party and the movements unofficial media outlet, Nothing emphasized this more than when Joseph Farah spoke at the National Tea Party Convention.
JOSEPH FARAH
Farah is a author, journalist, editor-in-chief and majority shareholder of the website WorldNetDaily (WND). Farah gained prominence for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of then President Bill Clinton's Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and later promoted birtherism, a debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States in an effort to dispute his legitimacy to be the United States President.
On July 22, 1990, Farah became editor of The Sacramento Union. The paper had been losing up to $3 million annually, and in early 1990 it was purchased from conservative mega donor and fellow CNP member Richard Mellon Scaife by Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis.
After the paper continued to lose money Farah left the Union in 1991 and co-founded the Western Journalism Center. WorldNetDaily became a for-profit arm of the Center in May 1997. The platform push narratives that align with the Council for National Policy, whose meeting Farah has previously attended.
Farah is a big supporter of Israel, so much he set up a Jerusalem bureau for WND headed by Aaron Klein, who regularly published pro-Israel propaganda on the platform.
Along with Zionist Christian convert 'Rabbi' Jonathan Cahn, Farah has hosted WND’s annual Israel tour taking hundreds of American 'pilgrims' to the Holy Land.
JEROME CORSI
Corsi is an author, political commentator, and conspiracy theorist. His two New York Times best-selling books, Unfit for Command (2004) and The Obama Nation (2008) attacked Democratic presidential candidates and have been criticized for including numerous inaccuracies.
It was the Western Center for Journalism that underwrote Corsi's The Obama Nation. Echoing WND's messaging associating then Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Obama with communism, Corsi's The Obama Nation includes chapters entitled "Black Rage, Drugs and a Communist Mentor" and "Kenya, Odinga, Communism and Islam". The goal of the book was to make sure Obama didn't make it to the White House but Corsi's smearing of Obama as a unpatriotic raving ultra-leftist radicalized by Islam and militant black politics didn't stop him becoming the first president of the United States of America of color. Corsi's narratives did resonate with elements of the religious right, remnants of the anticommunist John Birch Society and KKK types. Contributing to a swell of discontent that would give rise to the Tea Party movement.
Corsi continued on his anti-Obama crusade alleging Obama wasn't a natural born citizen and thus ineligible to be US President, authoring another book titled Where's The Birth Certificate? This hysteria was a subject continually pushed by WND and other conspiracy theory peddling platforms. Ultimately Corsi's friend Donald Trump picked up the issue and it catapulted him into the political limelight and took the issue mainstream.
Corsi openly bragged that he convinced Donald Trump to run for president in 2016 telling Trump he would have the backing of unnamed military generals to carry out what he dubbed a "coup d'etat". Interestingly, after Donald Trump was inaugurated Corsi seized to contribute articles to WND and was featured more on Infowars, whom Corsi headed the Washington Bureau for. Corsi became embroiled in the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation. Draft court documents showed that he emailed Roger Stone updating him on Wikileaks' release of impending stolen emails of Hillary Clinton. Other court documents detailed how Corsi and Stone were in contact with an Israeli intelligence official and were conspiring together to carry out an October surprise to help get Donald Trump elected.
In the fallout of the DNC being a victim of hacking by the GRU, Corsi ran a disinformation campaign known as the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Rich was a DNC volunteer who was killed in a street robbery. Corsi promoted lies that he leaked the information rather than it being hacked and as a result had been murdered by the deep state. The lies pushed by Corsi further fueled the Clinton body count conspiracy building off this networks past conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Vince Foster. After being thoroughly discredit and exposed by the Mueller Investigation, Corsi later apologized to the family of Seth Rich. Corsi did so and retracted articles that peddled his previous lies.
Corsi was also a key peddler and popularizer of QAnon conspiracy theories, acting as a 'decoder' of cryptic messages from the mythical 'Q' championing Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly other promoters of QAnon were military generals; the disgraced Michael Flynn and another Putin ally Paul Vallely. The key theme of QAnon mirrored Corsi's theme for his latest book; Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump. This narrative has been challenged in several video made for the Expose The Enemy video channels specifically one titled 'Alex Jones And The Real 'Deep State' Revealed.
In the fallout of the Mueller Investigation there was a fallout between Corsi and Roger Stone. Corsi's testimony wasn't favorable to Stone and his legal situation. Stone was convicted on seven felony charges, including lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. (Trump later pardoned Stone.)
This seemingly brought an end to Corsi's relationship with Infowars when Alex Jones sided with Roger Stone. Jones referred to Corsi as "extremely mentally degraded to the point of what I would call dementia" according to a defamation lawsuit filed by Corsi against Jones. The lawsuit was unsuccessful.
Corsi is a staunch supporter of Israel and headed a securities company working on behalf of B'nai B'rith underwriting, administering and distributing loans for investment into Israel. "The Israel Fund is a major mutual fund design to bring U.S. dollars into Israel for the development of business." Jerome Corsi told JTA.
Corsi would go on to author the book Why Israel Can't Wait: The Coming War Between Israel and Iran. Corsi used the book to attack President Obama's foreign policy and made up lies about Obama allowing Iran to enrich uranium. The whole point of the Iran Deal was to open dialogue with Iran with the promise not to enrich uranium. in exchange for having seized assets returned to them.
Ever since the Iran Deal was scrapped by Donald Trump there has been increased tensions and worrying incidents that could have escalated into bigger conflicts. Right now in 2024 we are on the brink of a larger regional war as Israel expanse its genocidal campaign beyond Gaza and into Lebanon.
LARRY KLAYMAN
Larry Elliot Klayman (born July 20, 1951) is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
Klayman started out politically left of center. As a student at Emory Law School in 1976, he volunteered for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, “thinking that this seemingly honest peanut farmer and former Georgia governor would be right for the nation after the cesspool of the Nixon years.” He also worked for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), a hawk with a record of supporting civil rights legislation.
In addition to his numerous lawsuits against the Clinton administration, which led him to be called a "Clinton nemesis," Klayman has filed a number of lawsuits against political figures and governmental agencies. Klayman's goal in initiating the lawsuits is often to obtain information through the discovery process, rather than to win the lawsuit. Most cases brought by either Judicial Watch or Klayman himself have failed.
Larry Klayman is a pathologically litigious attorney and professional gadfly notorious for suing everyone from Iran’s Supreme Leader to his own mother. He has spent years denouncing Barack Obama as a crypto-Communist Muslim, convening meaningless “citizens grand juries,” and railing against an endless list of enemies.
“I am more than embarrassed and appalled as a Jew to see my own people at the forefront of a number of scandals now perpetrated by the Muslim-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama, and his leftist Jewish government comrades and partners in crime.”
—2013 column for WorldNetDaily entitled “Ethical Decline of Liberal Jewish Intelligentsia”
To be clear, Barack Obama isn't nor has ever been a Muslim.
“This country belongs to us, not you. This land is our land! And, we will fight you will [sic] all legal means, including exercising our legitimate Second Amendment rights of self-defense, to end your tyranny and restore freedom to our shores!”
—2014 column for WorldNetDaily, “Mounting Government Tyranny Furthers Revolution,” in which Klayman encouraged armed militiamen to take on “government goons” and oppose “modern-day despotism”
“No other Muslim has done as much, particularly given his power as president of the United States, to further Allah’s goal of a Christian and Jew-free world.”
—2015 column for WorldNetDaily, “Muslim of the Year,” in which Klayman again claims President Obama is secretly a Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen. Klayman also perpetuating the myth that followers of Christianity and Judaism are victims of persecution in the United States. A narrative that WND has popularized.
“[T]he Islamic religion and Muslim culture is [sic] simply not compatible with a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values and roots. To the extent they can be kept out of this country, this must be done. We are at war with Islam.”
—2016 column for WorldNetDaily, “America’s Sheriff Goes Before Supremes on Amnesty,” in which Klayman discusses legal proceedings he’s begun with Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Klayman's name has appeared on past Council for National Policy membership lists.
Klayman was also a director of Accuracy In Media.
THE WESTERN CENTER FOR JOURNALISM
The Western Journalism Center was founded in 1991 by Joseph Farah and James H. Smith. Based in Sacramento, California. The center produces a conservative newsletter.
The Center helped fund Christopher W. Ruddy (who later founded NewsMax) to investigate conspiracies surrounding the death of Vincent Foster, which was part of the Arkansas Project. Eventually, "the Center placed some 50 ads reprinting Ruddy's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review stories in the Washington Times, then repackaged the articles as a packet titled "The Ruddy Investigation," which sold for $12." In addition, "Farah also bought full page ads publicizing Ruddy's allegations that appeared in papers including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times" and "the ad campaign brought in over $500,000, half from individual donors-many of whom bought Foster conspiracy materials-and half from foundations, including $100,000 from Carthage." The Carthage Foundation is controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, whose foundations gave $330,000 to the Center in 1994 and 1995. Later, "WJC circulated a video featuring Ruddy's claims, Unanswered-The Death of Vincent Foster, that was produced by author James Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and co-editor of the Strategic Investment newsletter."
In 1997 Joseph Farah created the news website WorldNetDaily as a division of the Western Journalism Center. It was subsequently spun off in 1999 as a for-profit organization.
Floyd Brown, a Christian nationalist activist who is serving as Kari Lake's senatorial campaign manager, says the Biden/Harris administration is so hostile to Christianity that he "wouldn't be surprise if they go ahead and outlaw spreading the Gospel in America."
FLOYD BROWN
Brown credits meeting Ronald Reagan at a Masonic Temple in 1976 for sparking his interest in politics when he was 15 years old.
In his early career Brown worked as a political consultant and conducted opposition research for political campaigns. Brown is noteworthy for founding Citizens United in 1988. In 2010, the organization won the controversial U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations to make expenditures in connection with federal elections. Further tilting political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations.
Brown and Citizens United worked on behalf of the successful nomination of disgraced Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.
In 1992, the Bush-Quayle campaign called Brown and his associates "the lowest forms of life" for hounding the family of a woman who had killed herself.
Susann Coleman, was a former law student of Bill Clinton. In April 1992, 30 news organizations received "an anonymous and untraceable letter" by fax "claiming Clinton had had an affair with a former law student who committed suicide 15 years ago." In light of what we know about what Farah's organizations did in an attempt destroy Clinton over the Vince Foster suicide; no one would be surprised if it was these dirty tricksters who were behind the fax.
Brown figured prominently in two ways in the Whitewater controversy of the Clinton presidential administration. Brown was investigating Clinton. Brown was contacted by David Hale, a municipal judge facing indictment for fraud, then functioning as a paid informant for the FBI. Under the auspices of Citizens United, Brown issued letters to 100,000 donors to Citizens United, asking for money and saying that he had proof that Clinton had engaged "in a massive cover-up and conspiracy to obstruct justice" in the investigations surrounding the Whitewater controversy. At the same time that Brown was investigating the Clintons, he was using the tax-exempt status of Citizens United to acquire funds, urging his donors to fill out an "emergency impeachment" survey, utilizing a push-poll technique. Brown's fundraising literature said, "Our top investigator, David Bossie, is on the inside directing the probe as Special Assistant to U.S. Senator Lauch Faircloth on the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee." David Bossie would later become deputy campaign manager to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.
While seemingly dormant throughout the George W Bush presidency, WCJ chaired by Brown emerged from the shadows to underwrite Corsi's smear campaign against Democratic Party nominee Barrack Obama in book form, The Obama Nation. At this time Brown launched the website Western Journalism and he became active in his capacity as president of WCJ chairing the host committee of an event called Western CPAC in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference began with a keynote speaker by New Zealander Trevor Loudon, a founder of Zenith Applied Philosophy; a bizarre combination of quackery including Scientology, Eastern mysticism and the ideas of the John Birch Society. In his speech, Loudon laid out a concocted conspiracy theory about lefties conspiring to crash the economy to usher in a communist takeover of the United States. One would assume George W Bush's Administration crashing of the economy wasn't part of Loudon's plan. Needless to say, his conspiratorial waffle didn't come into fruition. This rhetoric would be adopted by future President Donald Trump, Loudon authored a book titled The Enemies Within, a phrase Donald Trump would go on to use to describe his political enemies and suggest using the armed forces to deal with such folk.
Brown was a co-founder in 2007, of the National Campaign Fund in support of GOP presidential candidates Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Brown and his National Campaign Fund created ExposeObama.com an anti-Barack Obama. The website purports to show that the Democratic nominee has inconsistent positions regarding abortion, taxes and other issues, in addition to being soft on crime and on what the site calls "Islamo Fascism". The website has been criticized in media accounts for "mudslinging" and misrepresenting Obama's positions.
In the spring of 2008, working for The National Campaign Fund, Floyd Brown launched what he called "the most internet-intensive effort for an ad debut ever" to disseminate via what he claimed was three to five million emails to conservatives the asserting that Obama was registered as a Muslim student in Indonesia, and that he attended an Indonesian school that taught Islam as a child. The claim has been refuted by the Obama campaign. Brown's attack ad implied that Barack Obama had been "soft" on crime as a state senator in Illinois before his presidential candidacy. The initiative was funded by a political action committee calling itself the "National Campaign Fund," which had $14,027 in the bank at the end of March 2008. Other Brown-established groups to raise funds in this effort include a 527 group, Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America. Brown also uses a 501(c) non-profit to raise funds for the Policy Issues Institute. Brown made appearances to promote his ad and his company on Fox News.
In more recent times, Brown has been working as the campaign manager for Christian Nationalist Kari Lake. In a 2024 interview Brown claims the US has gone "backwards in race relations" blaming Barrack Obama for so much racial division: "Now, because of DEI, when you see a Black surgeon, you get a question in your mind." Implying he doesn't trust a surgeon based on their race. His latest fear-mongering claim is that the Biden/Harris administration is so hostile to Christianity that he "wouldn't be surprise if they go ahead and outlaw spreading the Gospel in America." Continuing to spread the mythical theme that Christianity is under threat and Christians are being religiously persecuted.
RICHARD SCAIFE
Richard Mellon Scaife (/skeɪf/; July 3, 1932 – July 4, 2014) was an American billionaire, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, and the owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In 2005, Scaife was number 238 on the Forbes 400, with a personal fortune of $1.2 billion. By 2013, Scaife had dropped to number 371 on the listing, with a personal fortune of $1.4 billion.
During his life, Scaife was known for his financial support of conservative public policy organizations over the past four decades. He provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the United States, mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controlled: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and until 2001, the Scaife Family Foundation, now controlled by son David.
Scaife was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Alan Magee Scaife, the head of an affluent Pittsburgh family, and Sarah Cordelia Mellon, who was a member of the influential Mellon family, one of the most powerful families in the country. Sarah was the niece of former United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon. She and her brother, financier R.K. Mellon, were heirs to the Mellon fortune that included Mellon Bank and major stakes in Gulf Oil and Alcoa aluminum.
The Washington Post called him "the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century." At the same time, according to journalist Jane Mayer, he gave almost no interviews or speeches on his motives and aims", and "rarely spoke with those who ran the institutions he funded"
Scaife financed anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications, the first among these was the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. It is assumed he came into connect with Christopher Ruddy via the institution.
Through contacts made at Hoover and elsewhere, Scaife became a major, early supporter of The Heritage Foundation, which has since become one of Washington's most influential conservative public policy research institutes. He served as vice-chairman of the Heritage Foundation board of trustees.
Later, he supported such varied conservative and libertarian organizations as:
American Enterprise Institute
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues and dissent on anthropogenic global warming
Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, a Harrisburg-based libertarian think tank
Federalist Society
Foundation for Economic Education
Free Congress Foundation (headed by Jim Gilmore)
Freedom House
GOPAC (headed by Newt Gingrich)
Independent Women's Forum
Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which operates the Collegiate Network)
Judicial Watch
Landmark Legal Foundation
The Media Institute
Media Research Center (headed by Brent Bozell)
Pacific Legal Foundation
Reason Foundation
By 1998, his foundations were listed among donors to over 100 such groups, to which he had disbursed some $340 million by 2002.
Scaife was identified with his contributions to conservative and libertarian causes. The Washington Post in 1999 dubbed him "funding father of the Right."
However, Scaife supported certain policy research groups which are not explicitly conservative, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), at the University of Pennsylvania, among others. He was also a major donor to abortion rights advocates, including Planned Parenthood, giving "millions" to the organization, although most of the donations ended in the 1970s, according to The Washington Post. His motivations aren't known but financing abortion advocates at the same time as 'pro-life' advocates poses the possibility that his goal was to push the issue of abortion into public focus. Thus, the issue would cause division between men and women with the ultimate goal of driving to 'pro-lifers' to vote Republican against their interests.
Opposition to Bill Clinton
Scaife's publications were substantially involved in coverage against then-President Bill Clinton:
Scaife was the major backer of The American Spectator, whose Arkansas Project set out to find facts about Clinton and in which Paula Jones' accusations of sexual harassment against Clinton were first widely publicized.
On April 15, 1998, The New York Times revealed that Scaife had spent nearly $2 million on the project.
In a 1999 series of articles on Scaife and foundations that support conservative causes, The Washington Post named a close Scaife associate, Richard Larry, and not Scaife himself as the man who drove the Arkansas Project, while also acknowledging that Scaife was still the project's lead financier.The question of how political intellectualism was centered in the subject or in his key aides, such as Richard Larry, R. Daniel McMichael, or others, remains an open question.
The project not only accused Clinton of financial and sexual indiscretions (some later verified, others not), but also gave root to conspiracist notions that the Clintons collaborated with the CIA to run a drug smuggling operation out of the town of Mena, Arkansas and that Clinton had arranged for the murder of White House aide Vince Foster as part of a cover up of the Whitewater scandal. The possibility that money from the project had been given to former Clinton associate David Hale, a witness in the Whitewater investigation, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen as a special investigator. Shaheen subpoenaed Scaife, who testified before a federal grand jury in the matter.
Scaife, who had previously employed Joseph Farah at The Sacramento Union before selling the paper, heavily financed Farah's Western Center for Journalism.
Scaife was a Council for National Policy member.
NEWSMAX
Newsmax, Inc. (or Newsmax.com, previously styled NewsMax) is an American cable news, political opinion commentary, and digital media company founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998.
Newsmax launched a cable television channel on June 16, 2014, to 35 million satellite subscribers through DirecTV and Dish Network. As of May 2019, the network claimed to reach about 70 million households via cable television. As of September 2023, the average audience for Newsmax was 129,000.
Ruddy started Newsmax.com on September 16, 1998, supported by a group of investors, including the family of former Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Casey. Later, Richard Mellon Scaife, Ruddy's former employer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, invested in the fledgling company. One of the initial board members was author James Dale Davidson who edited a financial newsletter. Davidson's co-editor, Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times of London, later became chairman of Newsmax.
Other news figures who later joined the Newsmax board included Arnaud de Borchgrave, the longtime Newsweek chief correspondent who also serves as editor-at-large of United Press International (UPI), and Jeff Cunningham, former publisher of Forbes. Admiral Thomas Moorer, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and chief of naval operations during the Vietnam War, also served as one of the company's founding board members. Former United States secretary of state and Nixon and Ford administration chief of staff General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. served as special adviser to Newsmax
Christopher Ruddy has attempted to position the network as a competitor to Fox News, including by hiring former Fox News hosts Rob Schmitt, Greg Kelly, Bob Sellers, and Heather Childers. The Washington Post described Newsmax as "a landing spot for cable news personalities in need of a new home," citing the network's airing of Mark Halperin and Bill O'Reilly following their resignations from other networks due to sexual harassment allegations.
After the 2020 United States presidential election, Newsmax published numerous conspiracy theories made by President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign about voter fraud in the 2020 election, though the network never confirmed the veracity of the statements and accepted the election of Joe Biden as duly elected president. Newsmax later issued an apology and publicly retracted any voter fraud conspiracy allegations. When asked about Newsmax's support of former President Trump, Ruddy stated, "We have an editorial policy of being supportive of the president and his policies".
Suggesting a military coup of Obama
John L. Perry began his Sept. 29 Newsmax column this way:
'There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.'
But Perry certainly seemed to be advocating just that farther down in his column:
'Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.'
Voting Machine Companies Lawsuits
In 2021, Newsmax was sued by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for promoting false claims that the companies had engaged in election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Newsmax and Smartmatic settled the suit on confidential terms on September 26, 2024. DirecTV dropped Newsmax from its lineup in January 2023, after the companies failed to agree on contract terms. In response, forty-two House Republicans signed a letter to DirecTV executives attacking the removal as an act of "suppressing politically disfavored speech." The two companies were able to resolve the dispute and DirecTV resumed broadcasting Newsmax on March 23, 2023.
Contributions to the Clinton Foundation
Newsmax has previously donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. When reached for comment, Ruddy said, "Like Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and other business people, I have donated to the Clinton Foundation and a few Democrats, but over 90 percent of my political contributions have been to Republicans, including ones to President Trump."
Climate Denial Content
In November 2021, a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate described Newsmax as being among "ten fringe publishers" that together were responsible for nearly 70 percent of Facebook user interactions with content that denies climate change.
COVID-19 Vaccine Used To Track Vaccinated Conspiracy Theory
Also in November 2021, Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson falsely tweeted that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine contained luciferase "so that you can be tracked." This echoed earlier false social media claims that the vaccine supposedly had satanic links due to "lucifer" in luciferase and alleged references to "666." Robinson's tweet began with the salutation "Dear Christians" and referred her over 400,000 followers to the Book of Revelation; in a tweet days earlier, she equated vaccines with the Mark of the Beast.
Qatari Investment
In March 2024, The Washington Post reported that between 2019 and 2020, a member of the Qatari Royal Family had invested $50 million in the network in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis. It also reported that network leaders had told staffers to soften coverage related to Qatar following the investment, a claim the network later denied in response to the report.
Misidentified Shooter Lawsuit
In April 2024, Newsmax was included as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a man who was falsely identified as the perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas mall shooting, alongside others such as Fox News and InfoWars personality Owen Shroyer. The man alleged the defendants had "recklessly disregarded basic journalistic safeguards and published the photo of an innocent man, branding him as a neo-Nazi murderer to his local community and the nation at large."
CHRISTOPHER RUDDY
Christopher Ruddy is president and CEO of NewsMax Media, a "media publishing company based in West Palm Beach, Florida," which he founded in 1998.
Early in his career, Ruddy was editor in chief of a conservative monthly periodical known as the New York Guardian. While with the NY Guardian, Ruddy debunked a story in the PBS documentary Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II that an all-black army unit had liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.
Ruddy called the documentary an example of "how the media can manipulate facts and narratives to create a revised history both believable and untrue."
Ruddy then moved to the New York Post, which he joined as an investigative reporter late in the summer of 1993. After initially writing about abuse of Social Security disability benefits, he focused on the Whitewater scandal involving then-president Bill Clinton.
In 1995 he joined Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as a national correspondent covering the Clinton White House and other topics.
Ruddy conducted his own investigations funded by Scaife money concentrated on the Whitewater investments, which extended to a conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Vince Foster, a Clinton aide with connections to Whitewater. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, published a series of his articles claiming Clinton was behind Foster's suicide. Although Clinton was never found to have broken the law by Ken Starr, Ruddy published his book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, regardless. His conspiracy theories about Foster have since been dismissed even by some more outspoken conservatives like Ann Coulter.
Ruddy has studied as a Media Fellow with the Hoover Institution. Ruddy serves on the board of directors of the Financial Publishers Association (FIPA), an industry trade group whose goal is "to share knowledge of best business practices to help our members' publications grow and prosper, while empowering readers with unbiased, independent information".
He is a member of the International Council, that was chaired by Henry Kissinger, at the CSIS, a bipartisan Washington, D.C., think tank focused on national security and foreign affairs. Ruddy also served as a representative on the U.S. delegation headed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham to the NATO 44th Munich Security Conference.
From 2009 to 2013, Ruddy served on the board of directors of the American Swiss Foundation, a nonprofit organization that fosters relations between the two countries. In 2015 he was elected to the board of directors of the Zweig Fund and the Zweig Total Return Funds, two New York Stock Exchange-traded closed-end funds managed by Virtus.
In January 2010, Britain's Daily Telegraph ranked Ruddy as one of the "100 Most Influential Conservatives" in the U.S. The paper said: "Chris Ruddy is an increasingly powerful and influential player in the conservative media and beyond."
Trump
Ruddy is a confidant of Donald Trump. While speaking with Politico, he addressed the occurrence of significant tweets from the President on Friday nights and Saturdays. Ruddy said, "He understands the news cycle. ... It's an opportunity to get out news on a Saturday, when other news organizations aren't pushing too much new. He realizes that Saturday is a free media day for him." The story described Ruddy as a Mar-a-Lago member and longtime friend of Trump's
Christopher Ruddy, Donald Trump, Michael Savage (Weiner) and son.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Washington Times is an American conservative daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It covers general interest topics with an emphasis on national politics.
The first edition of The Washington Times was published on May 17, 1982. The newspaper was founded by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon, and it was owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification Church movement.
The founding of the newspaper aligns with the founding of the Council for National Policy and during the early part of Reagan's presidency. Sun Myung Moon was a financial titan in the right wing sphere specifically in the religious right and anticommunist wings were there is a lot of overlap.
The Washington Times published an op-ed column titled, “More cover-up questions: The curious murder of Seth Rich poses questions that just won’t stay under the official rug,” by Adm. James Lyons (Ret.) (the “Column”), on March 1 online and on March 2 in its paper editions. The Column included statements about Aaron Rich, the brother of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, that The Washington Times admitted were false in a retraction.
One such statement was that: “Interestingly, it is well known in the intelligence circles that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, downloaded the DNC emails and was paid by Wikileaks for that information.” The Washington Times now does not have any basis to believe any part of that statement to be true, and The Washington Times retracts it in its entirety.
The Column also stated: “Also, why hasn’t Aaron Rich been interviewed by law enforcement], and where is he?” The Washington Times understands that law enforcement officials have interviewed Mr. Rich and that he has cooperated with their investigation. The Washington Times did not intend to imply that Mr. Rich has obstructed justice in any way, and The Washington Times retracts and disavows any such implication.
DAVID KEENE
David Arthur Keene (born May 20, 1945) is an American political consultant, former presidential advisor, and newspaper editor, formerly the Opinion Editor of The Washington Times. He was chair of the American Conservative Union from 1984 to 2011 overseeing CPAC. Keene was the president of the National Rifle Association of America for the traditional two one-year terms from 2011 to 2013.
Keene made a name for himself as chapter leader and eventually national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) while at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960
Keene has extensive political experience, he worked as a political assistant to Vice President Spiro Agnew during the Nixon administration, and then in the 1970s as executive assistant to Senator James L. Buckley.
Keene went on to become the southern regional coordinator for Ronald Reagan's 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination and national political director for George H. W. Bush's 1980 presidential campaign. He advised Senator Robert Dole's 1988 and 1996 presidential campaigns. In 2007 he endorsed Mitt Romney for president and was an advisor to his second run for president.
From 2006 to 2007, Keene represented the Nigerian and Algerian governments while working for Carmen Group, a DC lobbying firm.
In June 2021, Keene was tricked into giving a high school graduation speech defending gun rights in front of 3,044 empty chairs — one for each student who might have graduated in 2021 had they not been a victim of gun violence. The stunt was organized by gun-safety group Change the Ref, which was founded by the parents of a student killed in the Parkland, Florida, massacre. The group released a video of the stunt that went viral and ends by asking viewers to sign a petition pushing for universal background checks.
Looking over some of his articles at The Washington Times you can find Keene has published a puff piece on pro-Trump oligarch Elon Musk and in a bizarre attack on Biden Administration, falsely claim the government refuse to do business with Musk. Musk's businesses have huge government contracts. For a fully detailed analysis of Musk and his businesses please check out this playlist
The themes of Keene's articles is what you'd expect from a typical right wing shill working for a publication owned by The Unification Church that is part of this Council for National Policy ecosystem.
JAMES LYONS
James Aloysius "Ace" Lyons Jr. (September 28, 1927 – December 12, 2018) was an admiral in the United States Navy who served as Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet from 1985 to 1987. He later served as chairman of the Center for Security Policy's Military Committee.
In the 2010s Lyons became active in neocon hawk Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy (CSP),] including its "counterjihad" project. He was a co-author of the CSP "Team B II" report Shariah: The Threat To America in 2010. The original Team B exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union and estimated they were on the verge of global domination just before the USSR collapsed. Needless to say CSP is financed by multiple military industrial complex corporations.
In 2015, at a launch event for the CSP report The Secure Freedom Strategy: A Plan for Victory Over the Global Jihad Movement, Lyons claimed that Muslim Brotherhood members had infiltrated "every one of our national security agencies," and made reference to the claim that then-CIA director John Brennan allegedly was a secret Muslim convert. Fitting with a narrative of this crowd's attempts to create the perception of Islamic influence within the Obama Administration.
On March 1, 2018, The Washington Times published an opinion column by Lyons about Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich's unsolved murder in Washington D.C., which has frequently been the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories. In the column, Lyons falsely claimed it was "well known in the intelligence circles" that Rich and his brother Aaron sold a trove of non-public Democratic National Committee emails to the news leak media outlet WikiLeaks, whose publication of the confidential messages caused chaos in the Democratic Party during the 2016 United States presidential election. Aaron Rich sued and the article was retracted with an apology.
Lyons was part of the Legacy National Security Advisory Group, a defense consulting group that advised 2016 Republican presidential candidates on foreign policy. Lyons traveled to countries such as Egypt and Syria in the Middle East, and collects information from a network of experts and informants around the world. Other members of the group included fellow CSP Military Committee and QAnon conspiracy theory promoter Paul Vallely and disgraced retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North.
PAUL VALLELY
Retired Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely is a former military analyst for Fox News and the founder of Stand up America, a right-wing initiative that “involves publishing, radio, television, speaking engagements, web site, writing articles for publication as well as books.” Known for his neoconservative and often conspiratorial views, Vallely is a member of the Center for Security Policy’s military committee and a board member at the American Center for Democracy.
One of the outlets that publish Vallely's ramblings is The Washington Times were one of his main focuses is former US President Obama.and his administration, often resorting to gross hyperbole and conspiracies in making his denunciations.
Vallely was a vociferous critic of the Obama administration and often resorts to gross hyperbole and conspiracies in making his denunciations.
Vallely has also promoted the conspiracy theory that President Obama was not born in the United States, saying in 2011 that he had “retired CIA agents and other investigators go over [Obama’s] birth certificate that was produced and by far ten out of ten have said its a forgery.”
In November 2013, Vallely accused President Obama of “intentionally weakening and gutting our military.” Later, in December 2013, he called for a “citizens’ arrest” of the president, saying: “I would say if we can make citizens’ arrest, I challenge our government that if we have people that are conducting treason against the United States and the best interests of our country, violating the Constitution, violating our laws, just as they are doing with these excessive executive orders that are coming out of the White House where you have a President and his team that doesn’t care about the Constitution.”
Vallely has also outrageously claimed that the Obama White House and the major network TV channels have colluded to cover up information about the 2012 attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. “What we have now basically is an invitation to seriously defraud the voting public, which in my opinion is just another indication that we need to impeach President Obama and we need the resignation of [Vice President Joe] Biden and others who were involved in this,” he said of the supposed cover up of the Benghazi attack in an April 2014 interview with Newsmax. “[T]here is collusion with ABC, CBS, NBC. They all need to be taken to task for collusion with the cover-up. How can you lie to the American people, put politics before the truth?”
In January 2014, Vallely stated that he would personally be willing to lead a coup against the U.S. government, telling a Tea Party group, “I had a call this afternoon from Idaho, the gentleman said, ‘If I give you 250,000 Marines to go to Washington, will you lead them?' I said, ‘Yes, I will, I’ll surround the White House and I’ll surround the Capitol building, but it’s going to take physical presence to do things.”
In August 2015, Vallely claimed that the Iran nuclear deal was a “moot point” because Iran already had nuclear weapons. He told the conservative Newsmax: "They have the launch systems. They have the guidance-control system. They have the detonation system. They have the warhead. And guess what? Russia and North Korea's tested everything for them.”
In September 2015, he spoke at a rally against the then-recently finalized Iran nuclear deal in New York City organized by a coalition of hardliner “pro-Israel” groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Zionist Organization of America, the Clarion Project, Christians United for Israel, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, the Middle East Forum and the Center for Security Policy. Speaking alongside figures like Steve Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Caroline Glick, Clare Lopez, and James Woolsey, Vallely wildly argued that the Iran deal was “treacherous” and also stated that “aiding and abetting” Iran is a “treasonous offense.”He falsly claimed that the United States would give Iran $150 billion of “U.S. taxpayers money” as part of them deal. In reality, the deal permitted Iran to receive between $50 – $100 billion of its own money which was frozen in accounts abroad due to sanctions.
In 2020 Expose The Enemy published a video covering Major General Paul E Vallely.
The video features Vallely's interesting links to major events in US history - From the authoring of Psy Ops to MindWar with Michael Aquino, founding of USAISA that are linked to Delta Force, inserting himself into Plamegate in an attempt to help the disgraced Scooter Libby, being hired as the head of military analysts by Fox News the week after 9/11, being recruited to be part of the Pentagon's military analyst program to propagandize the public into supporting an invasion of Iraq in 2003, to his involvement in promoting unhinged conspiracy theories in the alternative media community including trying to legitimize QAnon and give credibility to it. His extensive links to CNP and Russia are also covered. You can watch the video below.
TERRY JEFFREY
Terence P. Jeffrey started as editor in chief of CNSNews.com in September 2007. Prior to that, he served for more than a decade as editor of Human Events. He was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area, the seventh of eleven children. Both his parents were doctors of medicine.
In 1992, Jeffrey served as issues and research director for Pat Buchanan's first Republican presidential campaign. In 1993-1994, he served as executive director of The American Cause, an educational foundation. In 1995-96, he was national campaign manager for Pat Buchanan's second Republican presidential campaign. Buchanan that year won the Alaska, Louisiana and Missouri caucuses, placed second in the Iowa caucuses, and won the New Hampshire primary. Terry writes a weekly column for the Creators Syndicate
Jeffrey is listed as Council for National Policy Board of Governors 1982, member 1984, 1988.
Jeffrey was an editorial writer for The Washington Times. As a columnist for publication he wrote about the US invasion of Iraq 'idealists may dream of a democratic, secular and pro-Western Iraq, but traditionalists would settle for an Iraq that has no weapons of mass destruction, does not invade its neighbors and does not collude with terrorists.' Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and did not collude with terrorists. He also hadn't invaded another country since the first Gulf War.
On April 25, 2009, Jeffrey published an article defending the use of torture by the CIA on detained Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah making the sensational claim that 'Waterboarding saved L.A.' This claim is strongly disputed by Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who first interrogated Zubaydah following his capture, by traditional means. He said the most valuable information was gained before torture was used.
The CIA destroyed all the recordings of the waterboarding interrogations in 2005. No one has been held to account for their destruction.
Jeffrey's mention of Los Angeles refers to a claim made by then President George W. Bush. No information that came from any of the operatives mentioned in Jeffrey's article led to arrest of a terror cell, thwarting a terror plot .on Los Angeles.
Jeffrey pathetically justified the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who under torture admitted everything he was accused of; this included every terrorist attack and plot, and assassination attempt plot as well as admitting to personally beheading US journalist Daniel Pearl. That was conclusively found to be a fabrication.
A consistent theme of Jeffrey's writings involve whining about taxes and the deficit. I'm not sure exactly how Jeffrey wants the wars that he supports to be financed? Maybe someone could educate Mr. Jeffrey on those subjects to spare him from any further embarrassment in the future.
DAILY CALLER
The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010. Launched as a "conservative answer to The Huffington Post", The Daily Caller quadrupled its audience and became profitable by 2012, surpassing several rival websites by 2013. In 2020, the site was described by The New York Times as having been "a pioneer in online conservative journalism". The Daily Caller is a member of the White House press pool.
The Daily Caller has published false stories and declined to correct them when they were shown to be untrue. The website has published articles that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change. In September 2018, the website cut ties with an editor linked to white supremacist causes. The website has responded to challenges to its stories in various ways, in some cases defending their claims, and in others expressing regret for story headlines or content; and on at least one occasion, when pointed out by other news outlets, the website has repudiated a past article writer due to support of extremist views.
In June 2020, Carlson left the site, with Patel buying out Carlson's stake to become majority owner. Foster Friess, a major conservative donor also known for being an investment manager, remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.
Vince Coglianese replaced Carlson as editor-in-chief in 2016 when the Tucker Carlson Tonight show began on Fox. Carlson departed the site in June 2020 to increase his focus on his new show. Patel brought in Omeed Malik as a new partner; a former hedge fund managing director and Muslim American Democrat, he was a donor to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The Daily Caller became a minority-owned and -run company thereafter. Friess remained a partial owner until his death in 2021.
In 2020, The New York Times noted that "several former Daily Caller reporters occupy prominent roles in Washington journalism", specifically noting CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and Daily Mail reporter David Martosko.
Cited by Trump
In 2018, President Donald Trump dismissed a National Climate Assessment report by the EPA about the impact of climate change in the United States, citing a Daily Caller story that the Obama Administration had pushed the authors of the report to focus on the worst-case scenario. FactCheck.org found no evidence for the claims made in The Daily Caller's story,
Terrible journalistic integrity
Fact-checkers have frequently debunked Daily Caller stories. According to the 2018 book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, written by Harvard University scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, The Daily Caller fails to follow journalistic norms in its reporting.  According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, The Daily Caller "descended into extremism and sensationalism, publishing unsupported and frequently vulgar attacks on Democratic leaders, false criticisms of liberal causes, and popular conspiracy theories. The site also became known for its promotion of racist and sexist stereotypes".
Some scientific studies have identified The Daily Caller as a fake news website. In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, The Daily Caller was ranked the least-trusted news organization by Americans,
NEIL S. PATEL
Patel served as Scooter Libby's deputy before becoming chief policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. In his role as an advisor to Cheney, Patel represented the Vice President at White House economic and domestic policy meetings, interacted with the business community on behalf of the Vice President, and managed the Vice President's policy staff. He also served as Staff Secretary to the Vice President, managing the flow of all documents to and from Cheney, including classified information.
Patel was nominated by the Bush White House to run the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but he was not confirmed..
After leaving the vice president's office in 2009, Patel partnered with Tucker Carlson to co-found The Daily Caller, a conservative news and opinion website. Carlson sold his one-third stake in The Daily Caller to Patel in June 2020.
Patel co-founded and is managing director of Bluebird Asset Management, a hedge fund focusing on mortgage-backed securities.
Patel is a member of the Council for National Policy.
Tucker Carlson photographed with fellow Daily Caller co-founder Neil S. Patel.
FOSTER FRIESS
Foster Stephen Friess (April 2, 1940 – May 27, 2021) was an American investment manager and prominent donor to the Republican Party and to Christian right causes. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor of Wyoming in the 2018 election.
In 1999, CNBC dubbed Friess one of the "century’s great investors." In a 2001 article, BusinessWeek suggested Friess "may be the longest-surviving successful growth-stock picker, having navigated markets for 36 years, in his own firm since 1974."
In 1974, Friess and his wife launched their own investment management firm, Friess Associates, LLC. Although success came slowly in its early years, the firm grew to over $15.7 billion in assets managed. Forbes named the Brandywine Fund, a Friess Associates flagship that boasted an average of 20% annual gains in the decade ending in 1990, as one of the decade's top performers.
In 2001, Friess Associates partnered with Affiliated Managers Group (AMG), an asset-management firm, to facilitate succession planning and to spread ownership among its partners. AMG acquired a majority interest in Friess Associates in October 2001 and held a 70% interest as of September 2011. A broad group of Friess partners, including senior management and researchers, held 20% equity ownership, while the Friess family retained 10%. The company was purchased by its employees in 2013
Friess was a longtime Republican Party mega-donor, giving millions of dollars to Republican and conservative causes, especially to Council for National Policy associated organizations on the Christian right whom Friess was a longtime member of.
Friess also donated $100,000 to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to help defeat the Democrats' recall effort in 2011
Friess put up $3 million as start up capital to launch Daily Caller.
Friess was also an advisor to Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization to which he donated seed money.
In October 2017, Friess said he was exploring a possible candidacy for the Senate challenging Wyoming Senator John Barrasso for the Republican nomination, at the request of Steve Bannon. However, in April 2018, he instead decided to enter the crowded Republican field to replace term-limited Governor Matt Mead. Friess was defeated in the primary, coming in second to State Treasurer Mark Gordon
Later life
Friess was diagnosed with myelodysplasia, a bone marrow cancer, in September 2020. He died on May 27, 2021, in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the age of 81.
NATIONAL RELIGIOUS BROADCASTERS
National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) is an international association of evangelical communicators. While theologically diverse within the evangelical community, NRB members are linked through a Declaration of Unity that proclaims their joint commitment and devotion to Christianity.
In the early 1940s in America, the emerging culture of hostility between mainline Protestant denominations and the rapidly growing evangelical Protestant movement reached a crisis phase in the world of radio broadcasting. Protestant denominational leaders argued for regulations that would restrict access to the radio broadcast spectrum. They claimed independent Evangelical preachers who were unaccountable to any denominational entity could not be trusted with the public airwaves.
In those early years of radio broadcasting, pioneer Evangelical broadcasters like William Ward Ayer, Paul Rader, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Walter Maier, and Charles Fuller had built radio audiences in the millions and were faithfully proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. By 1942, the Mutual Broadcasting System received more than 25% of its total revenue from religious broadcasters.
Yet in 1943, the Federal Council of Churches (later renamed the National Council of Churches) supported proposed regulations that would have resulted in every Evangelical broadcaster being taken off the national radio networks. They demanded that religious broadcasting should only be aired as a public service during free or "sustaining" time donated by the radio networks. They further argued that these public service slots should only be allocated to "responsible" religious broadcasters that had been approved by local and national denominational councils – like themselves.
The Federal Council of Churches persuaded all three national radio networks – NBC, CBS, and the Mutual Broadcasting System – to adopt the proposed regulations. Subsequently, every Evangelical Christian broadcaster was taken off the national radio networks, with their only access being small independent stations with a very limited audience.
In response to this challenge, 150 Evangelical Christian broadcasters and church leaders held a series of meetings which led to the formation of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). In the fall of 1944, members of the NRB adopted their Constitution, Bylaws, Statement of Faith, and Code of Ethics. And thus began a multi-year effort by NRB to build credibility for Evangelical broadcasters, to secure available public interest slots, and to overturn the ban on the purchase of radio airtime for religious broadcasting.
In 1949 the newly formed ABC radio network reversed the ban on paid religious broadcasting, with the other networks following their lead. In a few years, Evangelical radio broadcasters were again on major radio networks with scores of new programs.
The NRB now operates in a more complex electronic media environment, while retaining its original focus of defending and expanding access to electronic media platforms for Christian evangelism. And the audience for religious broadcasters has expanded, with 141 million Americans using Christian media at least once per month
Membership
Members of the association are required to ascribe to the Statement of Faith and adhere to the NRB Code of Ethics. NRB members must also meet the Standards of Financial Accountability set forth by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA).
Controversy
On 27 August 2021 NRB fired its senior vice president of communications, Daniel Darling, because he expressed support for the use of vaccines to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This was done in the midst of a precipitous rise in COVID-19 deaths blamed largely on low vaccination rates against the disease.
NRB host a special breakfast honoring Israel as the Netanyahu regime commence with their genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Republican nominee for President Donald Trump speaks at a NRB gathering before being elected US President for the second time.
JERRY JOHNSON
Dr. Jerry A. Johnson is the former President of the National Religious Broadcasters. He became president of NRB on November 1, 2013, succeeding Dr. Frank Wright. Before accepting that post, he was President of Criswell College, and former Dean of Academics at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also held several positions during 14 years at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. From 2013-2014 he served as Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Johnson is a contributor to The Federalist Society, a right-wing libertarian legal organization.
He is also listed as a member of the Council for National Policy.
SALEM MEDIA GROUP
Stuart, along with his brother-in-law, Edward Atsinger, founded Salem Communications (now Salem Media Group) in 1986 and expanded Salem’s influence with Christian and politically conservative News Talk formatted radio stations and media assets nationwide. Mr. Epperson was a longtime leader in Christian radio as a former member of the board of directors of the National Religious Broadcasters Association. In 2005, Time Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Stuart was involved in several other conservative organizations dedicated to preserving Judeo Christian values in our culture through public policy. He was a past president of the conservative Council for National Policy ("CNP”). In 1984 and 1986, Epperson was the Republican nominee for the fifth Congressional district of North Carolina.
"'Unlike a traditional radio company, religious broadcaster Salem Communications Corp. relies largely on the sale of chunks of airtime to make money, rather than on the sale of advertising. More than 50% of Salem's 1998 gross broadcast revenue came from the sale of nationally syndicated and local 'block program time' to religious groups. That was one of the insights in a June 4 company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Local advertising provided 30.6% of revenue, and national ads, 5.2%.
"'The filing details Salem's plans to go public, probably by the end of this month, and provides a detailed look at the heretofore-closed world of a Christian radio broadcaster, in this case the nation's largest both in number of stations and audience coverage. Camarillo, Calif.-based Salem owns or is buying 52 radio stations, mostly in major markets. The company owns stations in nine of the top 10 markets and 14 of the top 20 and intends to keep buying stations in the top 50 markets, both where it already has stations and in new cities. The offering will be comprised of 7.5 million shares of stock (1.5 million from current shareholders) priced at $19-$21 per share. The stock will be sold on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol 'SALM'. Salem plans to use the estimated $111.3 million in net proceeds to repay debt and fund recent station purchases.
"'Upon completion of the offering, President Edward G. Atsinger III, Chairman Stuart W. Epperson and Nancy A. Epperson, Epperson's wife and Atsinger's sister, will control about 90% of the company. Salem executives and analysts working on the company's initial public offering could not comment for this story because of SEC restrictions.' [Broadcasting & Cable, Vol. 129, No. 25, p. 91, 6/99]."
Salem also owns the domain name Christianpirateradio.com, which points to several web streams of Christian rock music. One Place hosts a diverse number of individuals/ministries ranging from Jack Hayford and Jack Van Impe to CNP man Dr. James Dobson.
Salem Media Group have their own political action committee called Salem Media Group PAC Donors. Individual donors gave 79 large contributions to this PAC in the 2023-2024 election cycle.
EDWARD G. ATSINGER III
Mr. Edward G. Atsinger III is Chief Executive Officer and Director of Salem Communications Corp. Mr. Atsinger has been Chief Executive Officer, a director of the Company and a director of each of the Company’s subsidiaries since their inception. He was President of Salem from its inception through June 2007. He has been engaged in the ownership and operation of radio stations since 1969. Mr. Atsinger has been a member of the board of directors of the National Religious Broadcasters for a number of years; he was re-elected to a three-year term on that board in February 2010. He has also been a member of the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Board since 2008. Mr. Atsinger has been a member of the board of directors of Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, California since 1999.
Atsingers name has appeared on leaked Council for National Policy membership lists stating he has previously been on the Board of Governors and a part of the Executive Committee.
Atsinger is also a member of a secretive entity called the Capital Commonwealth Group (CCG) comprised of four multi-millionaires who collaborate to maximize their influence by recruiting and funding candidates for state political office in California: Howard Ahmanson (heir to the Home Savings & Loan fortune); Rob Hurtt (president of Container Supply Company, and now a state senator); Edward Atsinger III (owner of 19 Christian radio stations); and Roland Hinz (publisher of dirt bike magazines). In 1992, as the press began to report on CCG and its links to the Radical Right, Ahmanson, Hurtt, Atsinger, and Hinz formed Allied Business PAC. During the 1992 election cycle, Allied Business PAC and members of CCG as individuals contributed more than $2 million to various candidates and ballot initiatives.
STUART EPPERSON
Stuart, along with his brother-in-law, Edward Atsinger, founded Salem Communications (now Salem Media Group) in 1986 and expanded Salem’s influence with Christian and politically conservative News Talk formatted radio stations and media assets nationwide. Mr. Epperson was a longtime leader in Christian radio as a former member of the board of directors of the National Religious Broadcasters Association. In 2005, Time Magazine named him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Stuart was involved in several other conservative organizations dedicated to preserving Judeo Christian values in our culture through public policy. He was a past president of the conservative Council for National Policy ("CNP”). In 1984 and 1986, Epperson was the Republican nominee for the fifth Congressional district of North Carolina.
ROLAND HINZ
Roland S. Hinz "has been a director of Salem Communications Corporation since September 1997. Mr. Hinz has been the owner, President and Editor-in-Chief of Hi-Torque Publishing Company, a publisher of magazines covering the motorcycling and biking industries, since 1982. Mr. Hinz is also the managing member of Hi-Favor Broadcasting, LLC, the licensee of radio station KLTX-AM, Long Beach, California, and KEZY-AM, San Bernardino, California (which were acquired from Salem in August 2000 and December 2001, respectively), and radio station KSDO-AM, San Diego, California. Mr. Hinz also serves on the board of directors of the Association of Community Education, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation operating radio station KLTX-AM, Long Beach, California, and KEZY-AM, San Bernardino, California. Mr. Hinz also serves on the board of directors of Truth for Life, non-profit organization that is a customer of the company.
Hinz's name has appeared on leaked Council for National Policy membership lists stating he has previously been on the Board of Governors.
His wife, Lila, has served on the board of directors of Paul Weyrich's National Empowerment TV.
Roland and Lila are co-founder California Independent Business Political Action Committee alongside Ed Atsinger largest backer Howard Ahmanson ($1.32 million to the PAC) and Sen. Robert Hurtt (Container Supply Corp).
Roland passed away in May 2023.
THE TRUTH NETWORK
Stuart Epperson Jr, an entrepreneur and committed Christian, founded Truth Network in 2000. Over the years, the Truth Network has exponentially grown through its expansion to 30 Truth Network signals and over 400 national affiliates.
Truth Network has been an NRB member since 2000, and Epperson has served on the NRB Board of Directors and President’s Council.
Prominent figures in Christian ministry and NRB members including Tony Evans, David Jeremiah, Chuck Swindoll, and the late Charles Stanley have featured on the Truth Network airwaves. The network also offers shows that tackle contemporary issues through a biblical lens, creating space for listeners to explore the intersections of faith and culture.
STUART EPPERSON JR
Stuart “Stu” Epperson Jr., a Christian entrepreneur who founded Truth Network in 2000. He is dedicated in continuing his father's legacy of dedicated to preserving Judeo Christian values and being a Council for National Policy member.
THE BOTT RADIO NETWORK
The Bott Radio Network is a network of Christian radio stations in the United States, broadcasting Christian talk and teaching programs.
Programs heard on the Bott Radio Network include Love Worth Finding with Adrian Rogers, In Touch with Charles Stanley, Turning Point with David Jeremiah, Grace to You with John MacArthur, Back to the Bible with Bryan Clark, Truth for Life with Alistair Begg, Jay Sekulow Live, and Running to Win with Erwin Lutzer.
DICK BOTT
Richard (Dick) P. Bott, Sr. is Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Bott Radio Network, a national leader in Christian Talk Radio featuring quality Bible teaching, Christian news and information programming 24/7. Now celebrating 61 years of service, Bott Radio Network began in 1962 when Dick and Sherley Bott purchased Country Music Station KANS in Kansas City, Missouri and transformed it into KCCV – Kansas City’s Christian Voice. Today, BRN owns and operates 120 stations reaching into 16 states with a combined coverage of 63 million people. BRN is available worldwide online at BottRadioNetwork.com, BRN mobile apps, iHeart Radio, TuneIn Radio, Apple Music, Smart Speakers, Roku, and Apple TV.
Mr. Bott is a pioneer Christian broadcaster. His broadcasting career began 71 years ago in San Francisco, California at radio station KSAN in 1952. He serves on the Board of Directors of National Religious Broadcasters and was inducted into the NRB Hall of Fame in 2008. He is the recipient of the Dred Scott Freedom Award (2015) and the Richard M. DeVos Free Enterprise Award for Exceptional Leadership from the Council for National Policy (2016).
Bott is a found of the Council for National Policy and a previous Chairman of the organizations Board of Governors.
Mr. Bott and his wife, Sherley have four grown children (including one in heaven), plus many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Dick and Sherley live in the Greater Kansas City area, and in summer they can be found at the Lake of the Ozarks.
RICH BOTT II
Richard (Rich) P. Bott, II is Chairman and CEO of Bott Radio Network, a national leader in Christian Talk Radio, featuring quality Bible teaching, Christian news and information programming 24/7. The network owns and operates 120 stations reaching into 16 states with a combined coverage of 63 million people. BRN is available worldwide online at BottRadioNetwork.com, BRN mobile apps, Apple TV, Roku, iTunes, iHeart Radio, TuneIn Radio, and Amazon Echo. He is the former Board Chairman of the National Religious Broadcasters and currently serves on the NRB Board of Directors. He is a member of the Board of Governors for the Council for National Policy. Rich also serves on the Board of Directors of Far East Broadcasting Company and Moody Center. Mr. Bott graduated with a M.B.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Business. He and his wife, Faye, live in Overland Park, Kansas.
Rich Bott II, Phyllis Schlafly, Dick Bott and Andy Schlafly (2014)
MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER
The Media Research Center (MRC) is an American conservative content analysis and media watchdog group based in Herndon, Virginia, and founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III.
The nonprofit MRC has received financial support primarily from Robert Mercer, but with several other conservative-leaning sources, including the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage and JM foundations. It also receives funding from ExxonMobil. The organization rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes media coverage that reflects the scientific consensus. The MRC received over $10 million from Robert Mercer, its largest single donor. It has been described as "one of the most active and best-funded, and yet least known" arms of the modern conservative movement in the United States. The organization rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes media coverage that reflects the scientific consensus.
As of its 2015 reporting to the IRS, the organization had revenue approaching $15 million and expenses in excess of $15 million. Bozell's salary during this year was reported as close to $345,000, with nearly $122,000 in additional compensation from the organization and related organizations.
In 1998, Bozell founded an organization called the Conservative Communications Center. The MRC also established CNSNews, the site of the Conservative News Service, which was later known as Cybercast News Service, several additional Media Research Center-affiliated websites. On its website, MRC publishes Bozell's syndicated columns, the CyberAlert daily newsletter documenting perceived media bias, and research reports on the news media
In October 2006, Bozell founded the Culture and Media Institute, an MRC branch whose mission is to reduce what he claims to be a negative liberal influence on American morality, culture, and religious liberty.
In 1992, the MRC created the Free Market Project to promote the culture of free enterprise and combat what it believes is media spin on business and economic news. That division changed its name to the Business & Media Institute (www.businessandmedia.org) and later to MRC Business and is now focused on "Advancing the culture of free enterprise in America." BMI's advisory board included such well-known individuals as economists Walter Williams and Bruce Bartlett, as well as former CNN anchor David Goodnow. BMI is led by career journalist Dan Gainor, a former managing editor at CQ.com, the website for Congressional Quarterly. It released a research report in June 2006 covering the portrayal of business on prime-time entertainment television during the May and November "sweeps" periods from 2005. The report concluded that the programs, among them the long running NBC legal drama Law & Order, were biased against business. Another report of the BMI accused the networks of bias in favor of the Gardasil vaccine, a vaccine intended to prevent cervical cancer.
CNSNews
Bozell founded CNSNews (formerly Cybercast News Service) in 1998 to cover stories he believes are ignored by mainstream news organizations. CNSNews.com provides news articles for Townhall.com and other websites for a subscription fee. Its leadership consists of president Brent Bozell and editor Terry Jeffrey. Under editor David Thibault, CNSNews.com questioned the validity of the circumstances in which Democratic Rep. John Murtha received his Purple Hearts as a response to Murtha's criticisms of the U.S. War in Iraq.
During the Israeli's genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinian population CNSNews.com added a banner displaying their support for Israel.
Parents Television Council
Further information: Parents Television and Media Council
Bozell founded the Parents Television and Media Council in 1995, initially as a branch of the Media Research Center focusing on entertainment television, after saying that he felt that decency was declining on prime-time television programming. The PTC's stated mission was "to promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry."
During his tenure as PTC president, Bozell filed complaints with the FCC over what he alleged were indecent programs and attempted boycotts against advertisers on television programs the organization alleged were offensive. PTC was one of many organizations that filed complaints over the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in which co-performer Justin Timberlake caused a brief exposure of Janet Jackson's right breast for which the FCC ultimately fined CBS. Excluding Super Bowl-related complaints, the vast majority of FCC complaints from 2003 to 2006 were found to have come from PTC.
In 2001, the PTC organized a mass advertiser boycott of the professional wrestling television program WWE SmackDown on UPN over claims that the program caused the deaths of young children whom the PTC felt were influenced by watching the program; in particular, the PTC cited the case of Lionel Tate, a 12-year-old Ft. Lauderdale boy who was arrested after murdering a 6-year-old girl. Tate's attorney claimed that he had accidentally killed her when he botched a professional wrestling move. It was ultimately determined that the girl had been stomped to death and had not been the victim of any professional wrestling move and was actually watching cartoons at the time the murder occurred. World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE) sued Bozell and his organization for libel. PTC's insurance carrier eventually chose to settle the case, paying $3.5 million to the WWE, and issuing a public apology.
In Bozell's mandated apology as part of settling the libel charges, Bozell said: "It was premature to reach that conclusion when we did, and there is now ample evidence to show that conclusion was incorrect. It was wrong to have stated or implied that WWE or any of its programs caused these tragic deaths."
Bozell and the PTC were criticized in a book entitled Foley is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling (2001), a memoir published by former WWE wrestler Mick Foley who questioned the reasoning and research PTC used to associate SmackDown with violent acts performed by children watching the program.
In 2018, the Media Research Center criticized journalist Katy Tur for introducing the issue of climate change into reporting on Hurricane Florence, while its director of media analysis bemoaned what he described as the use of "spin" to politicize media coverage of natural disasters. In 2017, MRC sponsored a conference by the Heartland Institute, an organization known for its effort to cast doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. In November 2021, a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate described Media Research Center as being among "ten fringe publishers" that together were responsible for nearly 70 percent of Facebook user interactions with content that denied climate change.
In 2002, MRC said CNN was "[Fidel] Castro's megaphone". In 1999, the MRC said that network news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC largely ignored Chinese espionage in the United States during the Clinton administration.
In MRC reports released from 1993 to 1995, it was claimed that such programs made more references to religion each later year, most of which became more favorable. In 2003, the MRC urged advertisers to pull sponsorship from The Reagans, a miniseries about President Ronald Reagan to be shown on CBS. The network later moved the program to its co-owned premium cable network Showtime.
The MRC has been a critic of the video game industry, arguing that there is a link between violent videogames and real-world violence; in this capacity, they (along with the Parents Television Council, a subsidiary) were invited to President Donald Trump's 2018 summit on video games and gun violence.
MRC released a report in 2007 claiming that the network morning shows devoted more airtime to covering Democratic presidential candidates than Republican ones for the 2008 election. Producers for such shows criticized the MRC's methodology as flawed. During the 2008 US presidential election, MRC claimed that the vast majority of news stories about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had a positive slant. MRC president Bozell praised MSNBC for having David Gregory replace Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann as political coverage anchor beginning September 8, 2008, but MSNBC president Phil Griffin disputed the statements by Bozell and others who have accused the network of liberal bias.
Bozell was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries, describing him as "the greatest charlatan of them all", "a "huckster" and "shameless self-promoter". He said, "God help this country if this man were president." After Trump clinched the Republican nomination, Bozell attacked the media for their "hatred" of Trump. Politico noted, "The paradox here is that Bozell was once more antagonistic toward the president than any journalist." Bozell singled out Jake Tapper for being "one of the worst offenders" in coverage of Trump. However, several senior MRC staff told Politico that they considered Tapper a model of fairness, although that viewpoint has since changed.
Criticism
Extra!, the magazine of the progressive media watch group FAIR, criticized the MRC in 1998 for selective use of evidence. MRC had said that there was more coverage of government death squads in right-wing El Salvador than in left-wing Nicaragua in the 1980s, when Amnesty International stated El Salvador was worse than Nicaragua when it came to extrajudicial killings. Extra! also likened a defunct MRC newsletter, TV etc., which tracked the off-screen political comments of actors, to "Red Channels, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal."
Journalist Brian Montopoli of Columbia Journalism Review in 2005 labeled MRC "just one part of a wider movement by the far right to demonize corporate media", rather than "make the media better."
On December 22, 2011, Media Research Center president Bozell appeared on Fox News and suggested U.S. president Barack Obama looks like a "skinny ghetto crackhead".
The Media Research Center has also faced scrutiny over the group's $350,000 purchase in 2012 of a Pennsylvania house that a top executive had been trying to sell for several years.
In 2013, Media Research Center president Bozell appeared on Fox News to defend a Fox interview in which Fox journalists conducted almost no research into the background of Reza Aslan to prepare for its interview with him, and its putative biases.
When the Media Research Center bestowed an award named for William F. Buckley to Sean Hannity, Bret Stephens, a neoconservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote an editorial in which he lamented, "And so we reach the Idiot stage of the conservative cycle, in which a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic, much less Orwellian, to those bestowing it, applauding it, or even shrugging it off. The award itself is trivial, but it's a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think."
L. BRENT BOZELL III
L. Brent Bozell III is the founder and President of the Media Research Center, which calls itself a conservative media watchdog organization; and founder and former President of the Parents Television Council, which his Townhall.com biographical note describes as "the only Hollywood-based organization dedicated to restoring responsibility to the entertainment industry."
"In June 1998, Mr. Bozell launched the Conservative Communications Center (C3) to provide the conservative movement with the marketing and public relations tools necessary to deliver its message into the 21st century. C3's online news division, the Cybercast News Service at www.CNSNews.com, has become a major internet news source with a full staff of journalists in its Washington, DC metro bureau, and operates bureaus in London and Jerusalem, with other correspondents around the world," his biographical note states.
"Bozell is a nationally syndicated writer whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications.
Bozell is Executive Director of the Conservative Victory Committee (CVC), "an independent multi-candidate political action committee that has helped elect dozens of conservative candidates over the past ten years. He was National Finance Chairman for the 1992 Buchanan for President campaign, and Finance Director and later President of the former National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). He currently belongs to the Council for National Policy (CNP) and sits on the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union (ACU).
Bozell served as president of the Parents Television Council from its creation in 1995 until stepping down at the end of 2006.
Media Transparency describes L. Brent Bozell III as "a zealot of impeccable right-wing pedigree." Bozell is one of ten children of L. Brent Bozell Jr. and Patricia Buckley Bozell. He is a nephew of the late conservative writer and National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and the late United States Senator James L. Buckley through Buckley's sister, Patricia, and is a grandson of William Frank Buckley Sr.
His father L. Brent Bozell, Jr., assisted Barry Goldwater with the writing of Conscience of a Conservative. He was the chief fund-raiser behind Pat Buchanan's unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992.
According to Media Transparency, Bozell helped orchestrate the smear campaign directed at the opposition to Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991.
During the 2004 elections Bozell launched a 2.8 million dollar campaign to discredit the "liberal media". Bozell's August 29, 2004, column, on the eve of the Republican National Convention attempted to smear John Kerry by accusing him of "soldier-smearing", for having reported, during his 1971 Congressional testimony, on atrocities being committed in Vietnam.
Ghostwriting scandal
In February 2014, former employees of the Media Research Center confirmed media reports that Bozell does not write his own columns or books and has relied on a Media Research Center colleague, Tim Graham, to write them "for years". Following revelation that Bozell does not write his own material, the Quad-City Times, a daily newspaper, announced that it was dropping Bozell's column, reporting that, "Bozell may have been comfortable representing others' work as his own. We're not. The latest disclosure convinces us Bozell has no place on our print or web pages." The Quad-City Times article appeared under the headline, "WANTED: A replacement for Brent Bozell".
Reports that Bozell did not write his own material were confirmed by his Media Research Center colleagues. On February 13, 2014, The Daily Beast reported, "Employees at the MRC were never under any illusion that Bozell had been writing his own copy. 'It's an open secret at the office that Graham writes Bozell's columns, and has done so for years,' said one former employee. In fact, a former MRC employee went so far as to tell The Daily Beast: 'I know for a fact that Bozell didn't even read any of the drafts of his latest book until after it had been sent to the publishers'."
Talking Points Memo reported on February 14, 2014 that, "Brent Bozell has staked much of his career on challenging what he sees as a lazy media establishment, all while reportedly collecting the profits from books and columns he never actually wrote." According to the report, "despite not actually writing any of the content, Bozell still collects 80-90 percent of the profits."
The Buckley family and their significance within the US establishment is covered in The Unauthorized History of The America Century Part Five - The New Right.
TERRY JEFFREY
Terence P. Jeffrey started as editor in chief of CNSNews.com in September 2007. Prior to that, he served for more than a decade as editor of Human Events. He was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area, the seventh of eleven children. Both his parents were doctors of medicine.
In 1992, Jeffrey served as issues and research director for Pat Buchanan's first Republican presidential campaign. In 1993-1994, he served as executive director of The American Cause, an educational foundation. In 1995-96, he was national campaign manager for Pat Buchanan's second Republican presidential campaign. Buchanan that year won the Alaska, Louisiana and Missouri caucuses, placed second in the Iowa caucuses, and won the New Hampshire primary. Terry writes a weekly column for the Creators Syndicate
Jeffrey is listed as Council for National Policy Board of Governors 1982, member 1984, 1988.
Jeffrey was an editorial writer for The Washington Times. As a columnist for publication he wrote about the US invasion of Iraq 'idealists may dream of a democratic, secular and pro-Western Iraq, but traditionalists would settle for an Iraq that has no weapons of mass destruction, does not invade its neighbors and does not collude with terrorists.' Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and did not collude with terrorists. He also hadn't invaded another country since the first Gulf War.
On April 25, 2009, Jeffrey published an article defending the use of torture by the CIA on detained Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah making the sensational claim that 'Waterboarding saved L.A.' This claim is strongly disputed by Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who first interrogated Zubaydah following his capture, by traditional means. He said the most valuable information was gained before torture was used.
The CIA destroyed all the recordings of the waterboarding interrogations in 2005. No one has been held to account for their destruction.
Jeffrey's mention of Los Angeles refers to a claim made by then President George W. Bush. No information that came from any of the operatives mentioned in Jeffrey's article led to arrest of a terror cell, thwarting a terror plot .on Los Angeles.
Jeffrey pathetically justified the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who under torture admitted everything he was accused of; this included every terrorist attack and plot, and assassination attempt plot as well as admitting to personally beheading US journalist Daniel Pearl. That was conclusively found to be a fabrication.
A consistent theme of Jeffrey's writings involve whining about taxes and the deficit. I'm not sure exactly how Jeffrey wants the wars that he supports to be financed? Maybe someone could educate Mr. Jeffrey on those subjects to spare him from any further embarrassment in the future.
ACCURACY IN MEDIA
Accuracy in Media (AIM) is an American non-profit right-wing news media watchdog founded in 1969 by economist Reed Irvine.
AIM supported the Vietnam War and blamed media bias for the U.S. loss in the war. During the Reagan administration, AIM criticized reporting about the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. During the Clinton administration, AIM pushed Vince Foster conspiracy theories. During the George W. Bush administration, AIM accused the media of bias against the Iraq War, defended the Bush administration's use of torture, and campaigned to stop the United States from signing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It described 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama as "the most radical candidate ever to stand at the precipice of acquiring his party's presidential nomination. It is apparent that he is a member of an international socialist movement." It also criticized the media's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
AIM, which opposes the scientific consensus on climate change, has criticized media reporting on climate change. The organization gives out the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award. Past recipients include Marc Morano (who runs the climate change denial website ClimateDepot), Tucker Carlson (who co-founded America's most untrustworthy news outlet, Daily Caller), and Jim Hoft (founder of another highly dubious news outlet, The Gateway Pundit).
Funding
AIM's income in 1971 was $5,000. By the early 1980s, it was $1.5 million. In 2009, AIM received $500,000 in contributions.
At least eight separate oil companies are known to have been contributors in the early 80s. Only three donors are given by name: the Allied Educational Foundation (founded and chaired by George Barasch), Shelby Cullom Davis, and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife gave $2.2 million to Accuracy in Media between 1977 and 1998. AIM has been funded by Exxon.
Vince Foster conspiracy theory
AIM received a substantial amount of funding from Richard Mellon Scaife who paid Christopher W. Ruddy to investigate allegations that President Bill Clinton was connected to the suicide of Vince Foster. AIM contended that "Foster was murdered", which is contrary to three independent reports including one by Kenneth Starr. AIM faulted the media for not picking up on the conspiracy, and applied itself for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure of Foster's death-scene photographs. Its suit to compel disclosure was denied by the District Court of Columbia in a summary judgment, unanimously affirmed by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
AIM credited much of its reporting on the Foster case to Ruddy. Yet, his work was called a "hoax" and "discredited" by conservatives such as Ann Coulter, it was also disputed by the American Spectator, which caused Scaife to end his funding of the Arkansas Project with the publisher. As CNN explained on February 28, 1997, "The [Starr] report refutes claims by conservative political organizations that Foster was the victim of a murder plot and coverup", but "despite those findings, right-wing political groups have continued to allege that there was more to the death and that the president and First Lady tried to cover it up."
Doxxing campaign against students calling for a ceasefire in protest to Israel's genocide of Palestinians
In October 2023, following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, AIM initiated a controversial campaign in which they displayed the names and images of college students who had expressed support for Palestine on trucks. This event sparked significant debate and controversy around issues of free speech, privacy, and online harassment.
On Nov. 16, 2023, such a "doxxing truck" sponsored by AIM, with a three-sided digital billboard, drove through Yale's campus displaying photos and names of at least 6 Yale students, 5 of which are graduate students of color, under a banner reading "Yale's Leading Antisemites." A website address printed on the side of the truck directed to a page with AIM's logo, which requested people petition Connecticut government officials and Yale to take action against those students. In late January 2024, AIM had a doxxing truck at CU Boulder in Colorado; one professor moved class online as a consequence.
Government Connections
Several of AIM’s board members have intelligence backgrounds. During WWII Reed Irvine worked in Marine Intelligence; John McLean was employed by the CIA; and Abraham Kalish taught communications at the Defense Intelligence School. Bernard Yoh also has a history of intelligence and military work. He is/was a professor of psychological warfare at the Air Force University in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a hitman for the Shanghai police during the Sino-Japanese war and organized the South Vietnamese counterinsurgency forces during the Vietnam War. In the 1964 Brazilian coup, Yoh advised the Brazilian generals.
Elbridge Dubrow was a former ambassador to Vietnam. David Lichtenstein was a senior attorney with the Federal Communications Commission.
Adm. Thomas H. Moorer was the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under president Richard Nixon. In that position he had Naval Intelligence agents tap Henry Kissinger’s phone and remove documents from Nixon’s desk. He was also on the national advisory board of the now-defunct Western Goals Foundation, a private domestic intelligence agency founded by former Congressman Larry MacDonald in 1979. Moorer is the vice president of the American Security Council.
Clare Booth Luce was a former ambassador to Switzerland and former member of Congress. She was also a member of Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Private Connections
The Council for the Defense of Freedom (CDF) has intimate ties with AIM. They share several board members. Reed Irvine, Murray Baron, Wilson C. Lucom, and Bernard Yoh, for instance, are all on the Board of Directors of CDF. Donald Irvine (Reed Irvine’s son) is the treasurer for CDF. Marx Lewis, chair of CDF, is on the National Advisory Board of AIM. CDF operates out of AIM’s offices as well. The CDF publishes a right-wing weekly called The Washington Inquirer. Irvine’s column appears in it weekly.
Historic Principal Officers
Reed Irvine, chair; Murray Baron, pres; Wilson C. Lucom, vice-pres; Donald Irvine, exec sect; Jon Basil Utley, tres; Milton Mitchell, gen counsel; John R. Van Evera, John K. McLean, Bernard Yoh, communications dir;. Natl Advisory Board includes: Hon. Karl R. Bendetsen, Hon. Shelby Cullom Davis (former ambassador), Hon. Elbridge Dubrow (former ambassador), Ellen Garwood, Marx Lewis, Hon. Clare Boothe Luce, Eugene Lyons (Reader’s Digest), Adm. Thomas H. Moorer (ret, former chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff), Hon. William E. Simon, Dr. Edward Teller, Dr. Eugene Wigner, Frank Fusco, David Lichtenstein, David Martin, Charles A. Moser, Abraham Kalish, Dr. Frederick Seitz, Adm. William C. Mott, Gen. Lewis W. Walt, J. L. Robertson, Midge Decter.
More Connections of Interest
AIM has also supported the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In 1984, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson wrote articles that exposed the death squad affiliations of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), a member of WACL. In response, the chairman of WACL, retired U.S. Major General John K. Singlaub, enlisted the help of Reed Irvine. In a letter dated January 30, 1984, to Irvine, Singlaub said that: "Any help that you can give us in obtaining a retraction from Jack Anderson for that part of his articles which link WACL with the death squad activity (in El Salvador) will be greatly appreciated. If a retraction is not possible, I would appreciate your assistance in neutralizing the negative impact of these articles." No retraction was made according to the author of this source.
AIM has been a prominent supporter of the Chilean Lobby in the past. The Chilean Lobby supported the military government under Augusto Pinochet that came into power through a coup in 1973.
Bernard Yoh contributes regularly to the Unification Church publication Rising Tide and is a strong supporter of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the South Korean government.
Murray Baron is a member of the American Chilean Council and was a member of the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the U. N. He was also the past president of Peace With Freedom Foundation, a former CIA front involved in African labor affairs.
Elbridge Dubrow is/was co-chair of the American Security Council’s National Strategy Committee.
Eugene Lyons is the retired editor of Reader’s Digest. He is or was also a member of American Friends of Katangan Freedom Fighters, American Chilean Council, Committee of One Million, Young Americans for Freedom, and the American Jewish League Against Communism.
Ellen Garwood, heir to the Clayton Anderson fortune, donated much of the amount needed to buy a helicopter for the Nicaraguan contras. She has also donated a large amount of money to their cause.
Midge Decter is exec dir of Committee for the Free World.
This group holds conferences and exchanges for "anticommunist intellectuals around the world." Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams is her son-in-law and Norman Podhoretz, editor of the right-wing journal Commentary is her husband. Decter was also on the Board of Directors of the now defunct Nicaraguan Freedom Fund. Decter is a Heritage Foundation trustee, an Ethics and Public Policy Center trustee, a Hudson Institute fellow, and an advisory board member of The National Interest.
Clare Booth Luce was a Dame of the Knights of Malta. She was a director of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, a fundraising group set up in 1985 by the Washington Times, a paper owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, to provide funds to the contras. Luce was on the Board of the Washington Times. She also served with the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) and the Committee on the Present Danger.
William Simon is on the advisory committee of AmeriCares and was on the national council of the Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America (PRODEMCA). Simon was also the chair of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund and is a member of the Knights of Malta.
Dr. Edward Teller was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger as of 1983. The Committee is an anticommunist organization which has advocated strict containment policies towards the Soviet Union. Teller also created the H Bomb. Teller was also on the advisory board of the Western Goals Foundation and served with the CPTS.
Eugene Wigner and General Lewis Walt were both formerly on the advisory board of the Western Goals Foundation. Wigner, a physicist, received a $200,000 "Founders Award" from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Wigner also served with the American Security Council’s Coalition for Peace Through Strength and on the board of trustees of Freedom House.
Shelby Cullom Davis is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation.
Misc: AIM claims to be "Your Watchdog of News Media." Among the shows they monitor, however, are entertainment programs which have a political twist. For instance, they often attack television shows such as Miami Vice and television movies such as The Day After (a show on the possible outcomes of nuclear war in the U.S. ).
Accuracy In Academia (AIA) was created by AIM. Irvine was the head of AIA, but it is run by Les Csorba. AIA is also a right-wing group that "monitors" what teachers teach on college campuses. It is relatively weak and primarily attacks teachers that do not teach AIA’s view of reality. Midge Decter has called AIA "wrong headed and harmful." In 1984, on a trip to El Salvador, Csorba praised Roberto D’Aubuisson–said to have death squad links–and posed with government soldiers.
REED IRVINE
Reed Irvine (September 29, 1922 – November 16, 2004) was an American economist and activist who founded the conservative media watchdog organization Accuracy in Media, and remained its head for 35 years.
Reed John Irvine was born in Salt Lake City on Sept. 29, 1922, the son of William J. and Edna May Irvine. He graduated from the University of Utah in 1942, and served as a Japanese interpreter-translator on Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa, with a commission in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. After the war he received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he earned another bachelor's degree in economics.
During the El Salvador Civil War, he criticized reporter Raymond Bonner with particular regard to his reporting in the New York Times of the El Mozote massacre. He devoted an entire edition of the AIM Report to Bonner, reporting that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America." In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords, the United Nations-sanctioned Truth Commission for El Salvador investigating human rights abuses committed during the war supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote remains by an Argentinian team of forensic specialists. The Commission stated in its final report: "There is full proof that on 11 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote, units of the Atlácatl Battalion deliberately and systematically killed a group of more than 200 men, women and children, constituting the entire civilian population that they had found there the previous day and had since been holding prisoner" and "More than 500 identified victims perished at El Mozote and in the other villages. Many other victims have not been identified."
In 1987 Irvine received an Ethics in Journalism award from the World Media Association, a group founded in 1978 by Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. In 1994, Irvine said about the conservative Washington Times, founded by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon: "The Washington Times is one of the few newspapers in the country that provides some balance."
CLIFF KINCAID
Cliff Kincaid is a "right-wing writer and activist who has been a longtime critic of the United Nations and other multinational organizations. He is also a writer and editor at Accuracy in Media (AIM), a right-wing media 'watchdog' organization," Media Matters for America reported December 8, 2005. Kincaid "served as aide to former White House National Security Council staffer Oliver North."
Kincaid is also the founder and Director of Citizens United's American Sovereignty Action Project, a member of the Advisory Council of Sovereignty International, and President of the National Committee Against the U.N. Takeover.
Kincaid "has received significant support for his work from foundations controlled by right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, who has funded AIM as as well as Kincaid's own organization, America's Survival, Inc. [which] is dedicated to 'educat[ing] the American people and to expos[ing] the influence of global institutions, including an International Criminal Court, on their lives'," Media Matters wrote.
Although Media Matters wrote in December 2005 that Kincaid's "organization appears to be run from Kincaid's personal residence," Watch Unto Prayer wrote in 1997 that Kincaid's organization was "housed" at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.
Opposition to the UN
On January 6, 1997, the National Center for Public Policy Research reported that Cliff Kincaid of the American Sovereignty Action Project "delivered a presentation opposing a U.S. bailout of the United Nations and challenging the allegation that the U.S. owes the UN $1.5 billion
In March 1998, the National Center for Public Policy Research reported that Cliff Kincaid of the American Sovereignty Action Project of Citizens United "discussed the United Nations' request for more funds from the U.S. The U.N., he said, has failed to reimburse $6-8 billion in U.S. peacekeeping expenses incurred by the U.N. Said Kincaid: 'The Clinton Administration looted from Pentagon military readiness accounts." Additionally, Kincaid said, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich "has endorsed repaying the phony $1 billion repayment" to the United Nations but, "[f]ortunately, leading Republicans", including Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, disagreed with Gingrich.
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In 1998, Kincaid authored the 'Washington Watch' column for The American Legion Magazine.
In November 2005, Kincaid criticized Fox News for broadcasting a program The Heat is On, which reported that global warming represents a serious problem (the program was broadcast with a disclaimer). Kincaid argued the piece was one-sided and stated that this "scandal" amounted to a "hostile takeover of Fox News." In 2006, Kincaid criticized Fox for "tilting to the left" on the issue of climate change.
Kincaid was previously a member of the Council for National Policy.
LARRY KLAYMAN
Larry Elliot Klayman (born July 20, 1951) is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
Klayman started out politically left of center. As a student at Emory Law School in 1976, he volunteered for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, “thinking that this seemingly honest peanut farmer and former Georgia governor would be right for the nation after the cesspool of the Nixon years.” He also worked for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), a hawk with a record of supporting civil rights legislation.
In addition to his numerous lawsuits against the Clinton administration, which led him to be called a "Clinton nemesis," Klayman has filed a number of lawsuits against political figures and governmental agencies. Klayman's goal in initiating the lawsuits is often to obtain information through the discovery process, rather than to win the lawsuit. Most cases brought by either Judicial Watch or Klayman himself have failed.
Larry Klayman is a pathologically litigious attorney and professional gadfly notorious for suing everyone from Iran’s Supreme Leader to his own mother. He has spent years denouncing Barack Obama as a crypto-Communist Muslim, convening meaningless “citizens grand juries,” and railing against an endless list of enemies.
“I am more than embarrassed and appalled as a Jew to see my own people at the forefront of a number of scandals now perpetrated by the Muslim-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama, and his leftist Jewish government comrades and partners in crime.”
—2013 column for WorldNetDaily entitled “Ethical Decline of Liberal Jewish Intelligentsia”
To be clear, Barack Obama isn't nor has ever been a Muslim.
“This country belongs to us, not you. This land is our land! And, we will fight you will [sic] all legal means, including exercising our legitimate Second Amendment rights of self-defense, to end your tyranny and restore freedom to our shores!”
—2014 column for WorldNetDaily, “Mounting Government Tyranny Furthers Revolution,” in which Klayman encouraged armed militiamen to take on “government goons” and oppose “modern-day despotism”
“No other Muslim has done as much, particularly given his power as president of the United States, to further Allah’s goal of a Christian and Jew-free world.”
—2015 column for WorldNetDaily, “Muslim of the Year,” in which Klayman again claims President Obama is secretly a Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen. Klayman also perpetuating the myth that followers of Christianity and Judaism are victims of persecution in the United States. A narrative that WND has popularized.
“[T]he Islamic religion and Muslim culture is [sic] simply not compatible with a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values and roots. To the extent they can be kept out of this country, this must be done. We are at war with Islam.”
—2016 column for WorldNetDaily, “America’s Sheriff Goes Before Supremes on Amnesty,” in which Klayman discusses legal proceedings he’s begun with Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Klayman's name has appeared on past Council for National Policy membership lists.
Klayman was also a director of Accuracy In Media.
STEVE STOCKMAN
Stephen Ernest Stockman (born November 14, 1956) is an American politician who is a member of the Republican Party and a convicted felon. He served as the U.S. representative for Texas's 9th congressional district from 1995 to 1997 and for Texas's 36th congressional district from 2013 to 2015. Stockman ran in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in the 2014 election but lost to incumbent Senator John Cornyn.
In 2018, Stockman was convicted on 23 felony counts related to money laundering and misuse of campaign contributions. He was sentenced to serve ten years in prison, and was ordered to pay $1 million in restitution.
On December 22, 2020, President Donald Trump commuted Stockman's prison term. According to the White House, he will remain subject to a period of supervised release and an order requiring that he pay more than $1,000,000 in restitution.
Stockman is a born again Christian, returning to his faith after hearing Reverend John Bisagno of the First Baptist Church of Houston delivering a sermon.
Stockman is a former member of the Council for National Policy (1996, 1998)
Stockman is a longtime member of the National Rifle Association. In 1995 during his first congressional tenure, Stockman wrote an article for Guns & Ammo claiming that the Waco siege had been orchestrated by the Clinton administration in order "to prove the need for a ban on so-called 'assault weapons.'" He wrote further that "[h]ad Bill Clinton really been unhappy with what Attorney General Janet Reno ordered, he would not only have fired her, he would have had Reno indicted for premeditated murder."
In 1995 and 1996, Stockman was proud to have played a role in the federal government's shutdown. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report summarized other details of the 1995–1996 government shutdowns, indicating the shutdown impacted all sectors of the economy. Health and welfare services for military veterans were curtailed; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped disease surveillance; new clinical research patients were not accepted at the National Institutes of Health; and toxic waste cleanup at 609 sites was halted. Other impacts included: the closure of 368 National Park sites resulted in the loss of some seven million visitors; 200,000 applications for passports were not processed; and 20,000-30,000 applications by foreigners for visas went unprocessed each day; U.S. tourism and airline industries incurred millions of dollars in losses; more than 20% of federal contracts, representing $3.7 billion in spending, were affected adversely. The first of the two shutdowns caused the furlough of about 800,000 workers, while the second caused about 284,000 workers to be furloughed. They were said to have cost Stockman his reelection in 1996, and the Republican loss of seven seats in the House.
Stockman became the laughing stock of his own party and dubbed 'Congressman Clueless'.
Between 2005 and 2007, Stockman worked with the conservative Leadership Institute as director of its Campus Leadership Program.
In 2006, he attempted to run as an Independent candidate for Texas's 22nd congressional district, Tom DeLay's former seat, and even though he had enough signatures to qualify for ballot access, the Texas Secretary of State invalidated enough signatures to make him ineligible. Stockman registered for the special election to fill out the remainder of DeLay's term; he was one of five candidates. He finished third, with 10.75% of the vote.
Second Congressional Tenure
Stockman opposes the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2013, Stockman supported a government shutdown caused by Republican members of Congress who sought to block a continuing resolution that includes funding for the Affordable Care Act. Stockman's last-minute decision to challenge Cornyn in the Republican primary for Senate was "sparked in part by Cornyn's role in helping end" the federal shutdown.
In January 2013, Stockman introduced the "Safe Schools Act," a bill that would repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. Stockman introduced the bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He asserted that "By disarming qualified citizens and officials in schools we have created a dangerous situation for our children."
In February 2013, Stockman voted against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, objecting to provisions in the bill that expanded protections for transgender victims of domestic violence. Stockman said, "This is helping the liberals, this is horrible. Unbelievable. What really bothers—it's called a women's act, but then they have men dressed up as women, they count that. Change-gender, or whatever. How is that—how is that a woman?" That same month, Stockman also invited Ted Nugent, noted for his violent criticisms of Obama and other Democratic figures, to the 2013 State of the Union Address.
Stockman was a member of Accuracy in Media. During his failed 2014 reelection effort, Stockman launched an anti-mainstream media campaign in an effort to raise donations. In an email to potential donors, one of Stockman's staffer complained of media bias and alleged that he had been misrepresented by a reporter that was looking to do a story that would give the campaign publicity to potential voters. Stockman blew off the reporter and cried victim when the situation was accurately reported on.
JON BASIL UTLEY
Jon Basil Utley,was born in Moscow in 1934. His British-born mother, Freda, had gone there as a pro-communist intellectual and writer. But after his father was spirited away to one of Stalin’s gulags (where he was executed in 1938). After this traumatic period his family fled the Soviet Union. This experience inspired Utley's lifelong opponent of communism.
Utley was the Associate Publisher of the American Conservative. He was a Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Utley studied history under Professor Carroll Quigley (originator of the historical term "World Empire" as the final stage before decay and collapse of a civilization) at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, followed by language studies in Germany, France and Cuba.
He attended many events at the Cato Institute, as well as Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings at Americans for Tax Reform (tax breaks for the wealthy). He supported Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation, and many other libertarian causes.
Ignoring the obvious corporate greed in a period of record productivity and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, Basil blamed government spending and medical costs for stagnant standard of living of the average US worker.
Utley's advice for people struggling paying their student loan debt was to file for bankruptcy.
Utley was the chairman of Americans Against World Empire. Utley portrayed an anti-war stance yet was silent on his role on the Council for Inter-America Security and his Christian Right friends and their roles in supporting brutal regimes and death squads.
He has served on the Board of Directors or Advisory Councils of many leading conservative and libertarian organizations including:-- Accuracy in Media, Conservative Caucus, Council for Inter-American Security, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Reason Foundation, Solidarity America." Utley was also Accuracy In Media's treasurer. He was also a member of the Council for National Policy.
He died of COVID-19 during the 2020 epidemic.
