The Grand Scheme of the Great Takeover

The Republican Party and the USA

Nov 29, 2024

[The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court: 9781620977385: Whitehouse, Sheldon, Mueller, Jennifer][^10]

Part I: The Foundation

How did we get here?

Donald Trump's election as the 47th President of the United States comes as a major shock to 48.3% of the voters - "that will set the direction of the country, state and local municipalities for years to come."^[1]

It started in March 1967 when two men met at the Café du Monde in New Orleans, LA.^[2]

For a Baptist seminarian named Paige Patterson, it was all too much. By 1967 the young Texan feared that his church, and by extension his country, were headed for the abyss.
. . .
A mutual friend suggested that Patterson should meet a like-minded fellow Texan, Herman Paul Pressler III. Pressler was Houston aristocracy, descended from a long line of lawyers and judges; his father and grandfather represented the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which would later become ExxonMobil.
. . .
Patterson and Pressler formulated a sophisticated strategy, informed by intelligence from a church employee familiar with the [Southern Baptist] convention’s inner workings.
. . .
Once they installed a series of like-minded conservative presidents, they could leverage their powers of appointment to take over the church’s various divisions.
. . .
Their crusade began in earnest in 1979, with a churchwide get-out-the-vote campaign.
. . .
Each year the Pressler-Patterson faction won. The mission was accomplished.”
The appointments followed. The church’s boards, agencies, and charities of the denomination were reconstituted year by year, until they were uniformly conservative. Dissent was quelled.
. . .
Patterson and Pressler’s next step was to extend their strategy from church to state. Their plan was rooted in the concept of theocracy: the belief that government should be conducted through divine guidance, by officials who are chosen by God.
. . .
[The] Seven Mountains Dominionism had followers from various conservative sects, including Southern Baptists, and its intense will to power would inform the vision of the Council for National Policy.
. . .
Patterson and Pressler’s strategies dovetailed neatly with a movement led by a Southern Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell, . . . .
. . .
In 1979 Falwell convened a meeting with some fellow pastors, inviting a Republican powerbroker named Paul Weyrich, who would become one of the architects of the Council for National Policy.
. . .
Weyrich cofounded three institutions that became crucial building blocks of the radical right (and, eventually, of the Council for National Policy). One was the Heritage Foundation, . . . . Weyrich became its first president. Weyrich also cofounded the Republican Study Committee (RSC) . . . Finally, Weyrich founded an influential Republican lunch club on Capitol Hill, . . . . The Weyrich Lunch would become a Washington institution.
. . .
Weyrich cofounded the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, as a way for the Republican minority to gain the upper hand. Republican state legislators and their spouses were invited to junkets at luxury hotels and resorts, organized and financed by hundreds of lobbyists and corporations. There the lawmakers studied “model” legislation, drafted by the corporations they purported to regulate.
. . .
Another member was Richard Viguerie, a marketing wizard who started out working for a Tulsa radio evangelist, building a valuable bridge to the fundamentalists.
, , ,
Weyrich’s team would engineer the Southern Baptists’ foray into politics.
. . .
Meeting Reagan for the first time showed the twenty-four-year-old Arkansan [Mike Huckabee] how religion and media could be channeled into political power. . . . “It was magic, and [the evangelicals were] a major force in Reagan winning.”
. . .
Weyrich had labored for two decades to expand the conservative footprint in Washington, networking among right-wing congressional offices, lobbyists, and associations, but he had yet to tap into a mass base. In Dallas he offered a glimpse of his plan: “We are talking about Christianizing America. We are talking about simply spreading the gospel in a political context.”
This meant a new approach to get-out-the-vote tactics, mirroring Patterson and Pressler’s tactics.
. . .
By the mid-1980s, Southern Baptist annual conventions began to look like precinct meetings of the Republican Party.”
. . .
By 1980 Weyrich’s complex machine was under construction, with the Heritage Foundation to program policy, the Republican Study Committee to wrangle congressional votes, ALEC to draft state-level legislation, and the Moral Majority to mobilize the masses.
. . .
Weyrich’s larger vision called for the creation of a new organization capable of channeling the money into shaping the message and rousing the manpower. That entity would be the Council for National Policy.
. . .
In 1974 . . . at the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) . . . . [t]he inaugural keynote was delivered by California’s then governor, Ronald Reagan.
. . .
On May 19, 1981, Viguerie gathered more than fifty conservatives at his handsome brick home in McLean, Virginia, to found the Council for National Policy.
. . .
Weyrich and [Morton] Blackwell—by then special assistant to President Reagan in the Office of Public Liaison—were founding members. So was Southern Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye, Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, and beer magnate Joseph Coors, who had helped Weyrich launch the Heritage Foundation.

The Secret Hub -- "A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy"

"The Council for National Policy, a secretive network of powerful conservatives, goes to great lengths to conceal its activities and even its members. But recently uncovered documents reveal the extent of the group’s influence on American politics."

For more than four decades, the Council for National Policy, or CNP, has functioned as the secret hub of the radical right, coordinating the activities of right-wing strategists, donors, media platforms, and activists. Its membership and meetings have long been undisclosed, but over the past two years [2020-22], a number of them have been brought to light. It has spawned generations of offshoots, which appear, disappear, alter URLs, and change names with astonishing frequency. Now two watchdog organizations have obtained new materials on the group’s current operations.
The Center for Media and Democracy has published the agenda for a recent CNP meeting, held February 22 to 24 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California. In addition, Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project based in Washington, D.C., has obtained the membership roster and most recent 990 tax filings required of nonprofit organizations.
Together, the materials shed new light on the CNP’s role in disrupting the democratic process. CNP archives illustrate the extensive planning its members undertook to discredit the 2020 election results, undermine local election officials, and incite the protest on January 6, 2021. The House select committee on January 6 has subpoenaed CNP election expert Cleta Mitchell, and the panel is also examining 29 texts exchanged between then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a board member of the CNP’s lobbying arm) in support of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
The Conservative Partnership Institute, which has attracted ample attention for its role in election subversion, is closely tied to the CNP, though few reporters have made the connection. The CPI’s chairman, president and CEO, senior legal partner, and senior director of policy are all prominent members of the CNP (see below), and the CPI has served as a public face for CNP tactics developed behind closed doors.^[3]

The Heritage Foundation is the more public-facing right-wing organization that was founded in 1973.^[7]

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by the founder of Coors Brewing and conservative strategists Paul Weyrich and Ed Feulner. They thought that President Richard Nixon had moved too far to the left and that other Republican organizations were too timid. They promoted a strong anti-communist message and a social conservatism that didn’t recognize a wall between church and state, and pushed for a smaller government.
The group quickly gained power under President Ronald Reagan, who embraced its “Mandate for Leadership”—a 1,100-page document of policies—and distributed it among his staff. Much of what came to be known as “the Reagan doctrine,” both domestically and internationally, was a repackaging of this product from the Heritage Foundation.
Having established deep inroads in the Republican Party, Heritage maintained that position through both Democratic and Republican administrations. They were largely responsible for shaping Republican positions to oppose the universal health care plan offered by President Bill Clinton. The Heritage plan, "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans," would go on to be the basis of then-Gov. Mitt Romeny's health care plan for Massachusetts and eventually form the core of the Affordable Care Act. By this time, the Heritage Foundation was attacking it.
Like many organizations, Heritage has seen turnovers in leadership, staff purges, shifts in philosophy, and difficulties in maintaining its place in a changing political environment. But the Heritage Foundation that exists today is practically a toddler. With a razor blade.
This iteration of the Heritage Foundation dates to the pandemic, when the group's previous leader, Kay Coles James, made the mistake of trying to follow safety guidelines, including closing the group’s offices for an extended period and putting up signs that encouraged masking. That led to her replacement by conspiracy theorist Kevin Roberts, who had been on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's COVID-19 task force and immediately pushed Heritage into suing to stop any vaccine mandate.
Under Roberts, the group moved swiftly away from its traditional conservative positions—and into Christian nationalism. It retained its funding and deep roots in the Republican Party, but it began pushing for the ouster of existing Republican leadership and for the historically hawkish organization to oppose military aid to Ukraine.
The organization also switched from supporting former Vice President Mike Pence in the months after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to condemning Pence for his failure to go along with Trump’s plans and ordering members to take down posts opposing Jan. 6 violence.^[8]

As it did with the "Mandate for Leadership" prior to the Reagan Administration, Heritage has prepared "Project 2025" for the incoming Trump Administration. (See my earlier review of Project 2025: The 2025 Plan To Takeover Government - by Patrick McNamara.)

. . . The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan.
“The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists,” this year’s Mandate for Leadership says in its introduction.
While Heritage is in charge of the project, the group counts about 100 other conservative organizations as supporters or participants, which the project says is “unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement” for its size and scope. Most conservative organizations with influence on US politics are signed on, from the American Legislative Exchange Council and Center for Renewing America to Turning Point USA and Hillsdale College.
Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, who previously led the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He wrote a foreword to the Mandate for Leadership, where he lays out how he sees America in 2024 – a place where “inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries”.
Based on the ideals laid out in the Project 2025 roadmap, the group takes a Christian worldview and wants to see the powers of the president expanded. Restoring a traditional nuclear family is mentioned as a key goal throughout the project.^[9]

Politics and Inequality

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