Where secrecy lies, democracy dies

The claims by Tucker Carlson about the January 6th attack being a peaceful touristy thing have drawn lots of pushback from the Capitol Police, lawmakers and President Biden. Showing a few cherrypicked images out of all the footage available persuaded no one. But Carlson’s not the only one unwilling to tell the truth.

Consider what occurred in one lawmaker’s office who refuses to discuss it because he believes his constituents are right wing extremists. No historian will include him in any future Profiles in Courage book. He’s a weak-bladdered coward running from the truth.

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There’s been a fresh outbreak, a rapid proliferation of theorizing lately. I mean, Critical Race Theory is 40 years old and it’s only come under attack in the past 2 years to prove its point: Lots of wealthy racists are racist.

Those wealthy racists are also 40 years slow. The same goes for White Replacement Theory. I expected the next to arrive would be Slow Wealthy White Racist Theory, but no, it’s Leaky Wuhan Lab Theory that the lazy mainstream media is promulgating. Proof? Science? It’s thinner than a high school senior’s absence excuse.

New Cold War rhetoric. Old school bullshit. The evidence still leans toward the wet market source per the science. It’s not the job of the FBI to do anything more than forensic science and that’s missing in this case. And why is the Department of Energy even involved?? Bats have never been measured in kilowatt hours and that’s also true of Chinese ooga booga viruses.

My favorite theory is that the FBI will soon go back to apprehending violent crooks and fugitives on the lam. A boy’s gotta have a dream.

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THE REOPENED ABORTION DEBATE is not about a scientific determination of when human life officially begins or whether the God of The Oversight Bureau condones the eating of fertilized chicken eggs. It’s not about the originalist beliefs of wealthy white guys who died two centuries ago, either.

It’s about conservative Opus Dei, Knights of Malta level Catholic extremists using massive sums of money to stack the Supreme Court so it will violate the beliefs of other religious people and eliminate the fiction that women get equal rights since everyone knows they’re really not human. And getting personally wealthy because IRS rules were created to favor guys so divinely inspired by their God in particular.

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To be perfectly clear, the majority position on abortion is not rooted in anti-Catholicism, nor anti-Christian and anti-faith secularism. It’s rooted in the belief that women have the same rights to control their own bodies that men do with their bodies.

There’s ample evidence that under the guise of religious belief, wealthy people and the overly bloated corporations they rode in on are distorting national politics so it no longer comes close to representing the popular will. Leonard Leo and his cohorts are hardly the first guys to play the rigged game.

In the wake of major deregulation of business begun in the 1980s, the ending of the media’s Fairness Doctrine, the consolidation of news media and the blatant lie of trickle-down economics (all following the disastrous conduct of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights reforms, the Great Society efforts to alleviate poverty, the creation of the EPA to alleviate corporate poisonings of people, and the Church Commission reforms of intel and foreign policy) the past 30 years has been The Great Undoing of 15 years of the popular reforms that occurred between 1965-1980.

Former Labor Secretary (under Clinton) Robert Reich has spent years trying to reverse this anti-majority trend. His recent video traces its beginning to the 1971 Powell Memorandum written by a corporate attorney who was appointed by President Nixon the same year to become a SCOTUS judge for the next 17 years.

Just as I think there’s essential things every American should do (like spending a couple of weeks visiting Washington DC’s institutions and museums), I think everyone should understand Powell’s memo, summarized in 7 paragraphs here.

Robert Reich’s video displays how big corporate lobbying has multiplied in the past 3 decades. It’s 12 times larger than it was when Clinton was elected in 1992. A little over 4-1/2 minutes, it’s also highly recommended:

Powell’s memo ignited business lobbying efforts but it was the coupling of that with the defense corporations, religious extremist groups and hate groups that escalated its power and influence under the auspices of the Council For National Policy.

Its membership, per Wikipedia, from a leaked list of the secretive group:

The Southern Poverty Law Center released a second leaked list of their members in 2020 which included these noteworthies:

My research into a number of the better known members of the group has always sought to answer one over-riding question: what’s the individual’s motivation for getting involved with such groups? What do they seek to gain from it for society, or personally?

A lot of times, the answer is ‘naked greed’. Bigotry and hatred is also common, with attempts to conceal it behind a cloak of religiousity. But after reviewing their membership list again - with many old names familiar to me like Conway and Bannon, et al, another name caught my eye: Cleta Mitchell, who sits on the board of the CNP.

I recognized her as one of the lawyers Trump hired to try and steal the 2020 election. So I reviewed her Wikipedia bio and found:

• From 1973-1982 she was married to a fellow Democrat Oklahoman, divorcing on grounds of incompatibility. He was gay. He died of AIDS in 1991.
  

• She remarried in 1984 to a banker. He was convicted of five felonies in 1992: conspiracy to defraud, misapplying bank funds and making false statements to banks. She said afterwards this convinced her "overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times". But not a word about her husband’s lawbreaking.

• She was one of 5 who convened the first Oklahoma Women's Political Caucus in 1971 when she was in college and supporting the ERA. From 1976 to 1984 she served as a Representative in the OK statehouse. But after her second husband’s conviction, she switched from Democrat to Independent, then to Republican in 1996. Most of the 1990s, she worked to impose term limits on Congress.
  

  

• Among the Tea Party Republicans she’s represented as a lawyer are Senators Demint (considered the dean of the Tea Party) and Vitter, and TP candidates from Alaska and Nevada. Plus extremists Trump, Pruitt, Bannon, and extremist orgs like CPAC and the NRA. She’s also opposed state and federal public health measures to counter covid, regularly violating them even after attending a super spreader event while maskless. Her indifference to others is appalling.
  

• She chairs the Public Interest Legal Foundation that began in 2012 claiming immigrants were illegally voting. But ever since the contested Gore/Bush Florida vote in 2000 she’s directed most of her energy on falsehoods about election integrity while pushing voter roll purges, voting requirements that disenfranchise students and minorities and opposes mail-in voting. Election analysts and scholars regularly dispute PILF’s claims with evidence, but its propaganda has ruled public perceptions leading 70% of GOP voters to believe US elections are fraudulent. PILF has identified almost 1,300 cases of ‘proven’ voter fraud have occurred since 1982 which averages out to 118 fraudulent votes every 4 years out of hundreds of millions cast, if their numbers were even correct (they aren’t).
  
  The election-thwarting efforts of her and a handful of attorneys were profiled two months before the 2020 election.
  

• Cleta was also very involved with Ginni Thomas at least two years before the 2020 election, part of the team from CNP trying to remake the federal judiciary. They succeeded in getting the most conservative Supreme Court seated since the Roaring Twenties, but their aim was for far more than reversing Roe v. Wade. They were heavily counting on a second Trump term so they could abolish numerous government agencies like the EPA, Dept of Education, the IRS and more.
  
  In the summer of BLM protests a few front line activists took up a call to defund the police, drawing massive conservative pushback (that claimed all elected Democrats wanted that. Again, with zero evidence.) But these rightwing extremists want to defund far more. No business oversight, no regulation was their ultimate goal.
  

• Covid proved to be their undoing. Not only did Trump badly bungle the response but this same group of extremists launched a massive disinformation campaign in an effort to legitimize all of his pandemic missteps. Nine months before the 2020 election, they recognized their efforts might fail, that Trump might lose, so Plan B was to completely delegitimize the 2020 election, with teams assigned to attack the results in every swing state (though they weren’t prepared for the close race in Georgia).
  
  But Georgia alone didn’t seal Biden’s win. Their teams and the legal challenges they made in every other swing state failed and failed badly. Cleta Mitchell’s involvement in Trump’s efforts to bully Georgia’s Secretary of State may have sealed something else for her. Don’t be surprised if she’s indicted by the Fulton County DA.
  

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  Back to the question: what’re Cleta Mitchell’s motivations to change from a pro-ERA Democrat to an extreme rightwing Republican willing to commit a dangerous assault on democracy where legal lines were crossed repeatedly?
  
  I don’t know. She’s clearly established a pattern of blaming others. She may have felt betrayed by her husband’s sexuality. Her second husband’s felonious banking practices were blamed on the FBI and IRS. And when her election denial efforts came to public light, she resigned from the law firm she was working for. She was likely forced to resign or face being fired but she claimed it was the extreme public pressure by ‘lefties’ that compelled her to quit.
  
  What motivates people who refuse accountability for any action or choice made, legal or not? Hubris? Privilege? The delusion they can outthink the courts? Sociopathy? In Mitchell’s case any answer is guesswork.
  
  But two more important things came to light as I sought that answer.
  
  The first is a two year old article in the ‘Washington Spectator’ that details much of these efforts, and much more. It was written by acclaimed author Anne Nelson, whose 2019 book ‘Shadow Network’ first alerted me to the existence of the CNP, which I’ve written about before. I discovered it this evening when this newsletter was 80% written. Now, I highly recommend that all my readers read this article too. (I’d rather insist that you read it.) And note: you may have to subscribe for free to the Washington Spectator to read it - meaning you provide your email - but you can unsubscribe the first week as I’ll likely do.
  
  The second and most important thing to be fully aware of is the CNP and all these dirty players aren’t going away. To them, all the ongoing investigations, potential indictments and convictions only represent a bump in the road.
  
  They still intend to push hate group narratives, promote conspiracy theories, advance copious amounts of propaganda relentlessly to avoid taxation, regulation or the healthy functions of a legitimate democratic republic. They’ll try to drive divisions within our majority group of voters. Many of them are gripped with the worst addictions known to humankind: greed for money and lust for power.
  
  Anyone and everyone who tries or succeeds at disrupting their efforts should expect to be belittled, dismissed, slandered, and possibly arrested for something (anything!) at the very least.
  
  Amway was a hoax. Blackwater was rebranded. Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt to avoid prosecution but their methods and motives remain in play. With a morally bankrupted SCOTUS at work, a wife of one justice clearly supportive of the coup that tried to overthrow both an election and the popular will of the US majority, and boatloads of hidden money busily funding it all, it’s foolish to expect them to quit anytime soon, if ever.
  
  Let prosecutors determine and convince judges and juries what the motives are. It’s up to us to decide whether to fight for the health and well-being of the entire country or whether to say “it’s too big to fight”, “I’m too tired,” and “I quit.”
  
  Or decide to beat them so convincingly and repeatedly that they quit and get held accountable for all their crimes. It might seem impossible that this struggle can get worse but i intend to be ready for it as long as I can think and breathe.
  

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