Noble Lies

Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1980 resulted from reformulation of the Southern Strategy, known as the “Reagan coalition,” a combination of voters that Reagan assembled to produce a major political realignment. The coalition, according to famed historian American conservatism, George H. Nash, originally consisted of five factions: the libertarians, the paleoconservatives, the anti-communists, the neoconservatives, and the second New Right/religious right.[1] The means of advancing the neoliberal agenda was to package it with “family values” and pander to the racist sentiments of Southern Evangelical Christians, a strategy largely orchestrated by Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation. The architect of the Southern Strategy, which was used to elect numerous Republican presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan, was the notorious Senator Jesse Helms, a founding member of Weyrich’s Moral Majority, regarded by his followers as the leader of the second New Right.[2] According to Second New Right leader, Richard A. Viguerie:

Without the New Right, there would not have been a strong, vibrant, and effective conservative movement. Without a strong, vibrant, and effective conservative movement, there would not have been a President Ronald Reagan. And without a President Reagan, the Soviet Union would have lasted many more years and socialism would still dominate and impoverish the people of most countries.

It’s the free market views, policies, and leadership of President Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Milton Friedman that have led the world to experience the greatest movement out of poverty in history.

The second New Right, which was formed in the wake of the Barry Goldwater campaign and had a more populist tone than the first New Right of William F. Buckley. The second New Right revived the tradition of The Fellowship, by cynically exploitation Christianity to serve as a Trojan Horse for a neoliberal agenda. Thus, the second New Right tended to focus on social issues and national sovereignty and was often linked with the Christian Right. Led by Robert Grant’s Christian Voice, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Ed McAteer’s Religious Roundtable Council, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation and the Heritage Foundation, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), the new Christian Right combined conservative politics with evangelical and fundamentalist teachings.[3] The Christian Right is especially amenable to neoconservatives’ Zionist ambitions. According to Irving Kristol:

The social issues of the Moral Majority are meeting with practically no success, whereas anti-Israel sentiment has been distinctly on the rise, and the support for the Moral Majority could, in the near future, turn out to be decisive for the very existence of the Jewish state. That is why the Israeli government has struck its own balance vis a vis the Moral Majority, and it is hard to see why American Jews should come up with a different bottom line.[4]

The neoconservatives’ alignment with the Christian Right fit with their adherence to Leo Strauss, who advanced prescriptions for the use of “Noble Lies.”[5] The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, the year of Leo Straus’ death, just as his ideas were coming into ascendance in the US.[6] For Strauss, Kojève’s “End of History” is the result of all the errors of modernity and its values of liberalism, and was equivalent to the tragedy predicted by Nietzsche, as being the days of the Last Man. Throughout his career in the US, Strauss regularly sent his leading disciples to study under Kojève in Paris. For example, Strauss’s top protégé the late Allan Bloom travelled to Paris annually, from 1953 up until Kojève’s death in 1968, to study Kojève’s Nietzschean fascist beliefs. Bloom would consider Kojève to be one of his greatest teachers.[7]

It was Strauss’ condemnation of “liberalism” which opened the way for the pronouncements against “political correctness” arcticualted by his followers. To Strauss, the problem with liberalism was that it led to relativism. Relativism was a problem because it removed society’s belief in one absolute truth, particularly religious truth. This was not because Strauss believed that such a belief was possible. On the contrary, he rejected all possibility of such truth, regarding religions as “heroic delusions” and “noble dreams.”[8] Rather, these delusions, or Plato’s “noble lies,” were necessary for the masses who would succumb to nihilism for their inability to manage the awful truth that there is no truth. But for Strauss, the “philosopher,” can create and manipulate delusions for the sake of society, but is himself beyond the truth and conventional morality, but he was required to keep his sacred mission secret from the rabble.

Essentially, the Straussian basis of neoconservatism is that “liberalism,” which is the source of western liberal democracy and free market capitalism, is in crisis because of the Enlightenment principles on which it is based, and which were articulated by Kant, Locke and Adam Smith and put into practice in the United States by Jefferson and Madison. The main anti-liberal philosophers were Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmidt. As with Marx and capitalism, the neoconservatives attacked liberalism as containing the seeds for its own destruction through historicism, relativism and nihilism. The reason for resorting to religion was that, to Strauss, the problem with liberalism was that it led to relativism. Relativism was a problem because it removed society’s belief in one absolute truth, particularly religious truth. This was not because Strauss believed that such a belief was possible. On the contrary, he rejected all possibility of such truth, regarding religions as “heroic delusions” and “noble dreams,” and said of Judaism that “no nobler dream was ever dreamt” and concluded that “it is surely nobler to be victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it.”[9] Rather, these delusions, or “noble lies,” were necessary for the masses who would succumb to nihilism for their inability to manage the awful truth that there is no truth. But for Strauss, the “philosopher,” who is equal to Nietzsche’s Superman, can create and manipulate delusions for the sake of society, but is himself beyond the truth and conventional morality, but he was required to keep his sacred mission secret from the rabble.

As Drury also noted, “there is an uncanny resemblance between Strauss’s view of the philosopher-prophet and the Sabbatean conception of the Messiah."[10] The Sabbateans, through the doctrine of holy sin believed, as Scholem pointed out, that "the elect are fundamentally different from the crowd and not to be judged by its standards. Standing under a new spiritual law and representing as it were a new kind of reality, they are beyond good and evil.”[11] Kabbalistic theology is highly erotic, and Strauss often relates that philosophy is a manifestation of Eros. To Strauss, Philosophy is the quest to understand man’s true nature, which is Eros, as opposed societal conventions which are artificial constructs. But Strauss’s conception of Eros is also connected to the fact that he points out that the greatest philosophers, those who manage to rise above convention altogether, were pederasts.[12]

Moral Majority

It was Helms who recommended to Reagan to appeal to the Christian Right, in recognition of the potential of grassroots support from Southern white Evangelical community. The support of Helms and his campaign manager, Thomas F. Ellis, a Pioneer Fund director, was instrumental in Reagan’s run for the presidential nomination in 1976, and his crucial North Carolina primary victory that paved the way for Reagan’s presidential election in 1980. Going into the primary, Reagan had lost all the primaries, and it was feared that it might end his career and that he risked fading into “political oblivion.”[13] With Helms and Ellis’ support, Reagan won in North Carolina, and the momentum it generated carried Reagan to landslide primary wins in Texas, California, and other critical states. Despite Reagan’s defeat to Gerald Ford, the intervention of Helms and Ellis arguably led to the most important conservative primary victory in the history of the Republican Party, and enabled Reagan to win the next nomination at the 1980 Republican National Convention and ultimately the Presidency of the United States.[14]

Although the Moral Majority was predominately a Southern-oriented organization of the Christian Right, its state chapters and political activity extended beyond the South.[15] zIn the decades following World War II, Evangelicals, especially white Evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party, inclined to fear of Communism, suspicion of Catholicism and Billy Graham’s very public support of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, Evangelicals remained largely apolitical. As explained by Ladd, while the rise of the Christian Right in the South has been blamed on a backlash against the Civil Rights Acts or the Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion, an unrecognized role was played by southern pastors themselves, particularly the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church and W.A. Criswell. The Southern Baptist Church was organized specifically to protect slavery and white supremacy from the influence of the North. “Southern churches, warped by generations of theological evolution necessary to accommodate slavery and segregation, were all too willing to offer their political assistance to a white nationalist program,” Ladd writes.[16]

Inspired by W.A. Criswell and Helms, prominent Southern Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discovered that they could preserve white nationalism through a proxy fight for Christian Nationalism. As recounted by Chris Ladd in “Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican” for Forbes, segregationists in the 1970’s faced a frustrating problem, how to revive a white nationalism without using the discredited rhetoric of race. As explained by Ladd, while the rise of Republican Party in the South is typically attributed to the Southern Strategy, an unrecognized role was played by southern pastors themselves, particularly the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church and Criswell. “Southern churches, warped by generations of theological evolution necessary to accommodate slavery and segregation, were all too willing to offer their political assistance to a white nationalist program,” Ladd writes.[17]

The 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States marked a milestone for Evangelical Christians. For the first time, a self-professed evangelical Christian had been elected to the nation’s highest office, bringing the national awareness of Evangelicalism to a new level. However, evangelical Christians in general—and eventually the newly formed Moral Majority in particular—would come to be disappointed with Carter’s policies. Evangelical churches across the South led an explosion of new private segregated schools. In 1978, the Carter Administration signaled its intention to press for their desegregation. When Reagan enthusiastically and explicitly supported protecting private religious schools, Evangelical ministers, previously reluctant to lend their backing to political activists, launched a massive wave of activism in Southern congregations in support of the Reagan campaign.

“Conservatives cannot become the dominant political force in America,” insisted Viguerie, author of The new Right: we’re ready to lead, “until we stress the issues of concern to ethnic and blue-collar Americans, born-again Christians, pro-life Catholics and Jews. Some of these are busing, abortion, pornography, education, traditional Biblical moral values and quotas.”[18] Thus, Weyrich and leaders of the second New Right made a concerted effort to appeal to the Christian and sometimes racist values of traditionally Democratic or politically independent constituencies by sharing complaints about a list of liberal causes: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, drug use, pornography, school textbooks and curricula, busing, affirmative action, gay rights, and so on.[19]

Viguerie, a pioneer of political direct mail campaigns, has been dubbed the “funding father” of modern conservative strategy. Viguerie started of his career with the KKK-affiliated evangelist Billy James Hargis, an associate of Edwin Walker. In 1961, Viguerie became executive secretary of the YAF, and considered William F. Buckley Jr. his “hero and role model.”[20] Viguerie learned his craft in fund-raising when he joined the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) as an apprentice to its founder Marvin Liebman, who was regarded as the conservative movement’s leading political organizer.[21] A number of conservative or libertarian organizations emerged from YAF and its members, including the Libertarian Party of America, Cato Institute, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Reason Foundation and the Conservative Caucus. The YAF has been described as “a network of conservative organizations on college campuses that served as training grounds for virtually the entire movement leadership.”[22]

Most key members of the New Right were former members of YAF, including Viguerie, Howard Phillips, as well as Terry Dolan and Pat Buchanan.[23] Phillips, a founding member of the YAF, was born into a Jewish family in Boston in 1941, but converted to evangelical Christianity in the 1970s. Phillips played an instrumental role in the leadership of the New Right, and in the founding of the religious right in the 1970s. Jeff Sharlet describes the attraction of Jews to evangelical Christianity in The Family: “It’s as if, casting about for the political passion of their immigrant fathers and mothers, they settled on Christian fundamentalism as the closest approximation of that vanished world, its socialist unions and communist cells.”[24]

In 1976, Weyrich, William Rusher, Morton Blackwell and Viguerie attempted to take over the segregationist American Independent Party (AIP), formed by George Wallace in 1968. Viguerie unsuccessfully sought the presidential nomination of the AIP, to oppose President Gerald Ford’s election. Viguerie would go on to work with Jesse Helms, Sun Young Moon, Oliver North and George Wallace. In 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant. Weyrich, being the leader of the conservative think-tank, agreed to let Grant set up headquarters at the Heritage Foundation. Evangelical minister Pat Robertson, who later formed the Christian Coalition, furnished some early financial resources for the organization.[25] Weyrich then recruited Howard Phillips and Richard Viguerie to help develop Grant’s organization.[26] In 1978, Grant announced in a news conference that the Religious Right was a “sham… controlled by three Catholics and a Jew.”[27] As a result, Weyrich, Dolan and Viguerie (the Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) left Christian Voice, and then persuaded rising televangelist Jerry Falwell and form the Moral Majority in 1979, signaling the birth of the Christian Right.[28]

Falwell was a close ally of the American Security Council, and part of the ASC’s Peace Through Strength campaign in 1983, along with ASC president John Fisher and General J. Milnor Roberts. Falwell’s Religious Council of 56 included General Daniel O. Graham and Clay Claiborne of the ASC, Nelson Bunker Hunt of the John Birch Society, and its president, Congressman Larry McDonald, a member of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta and founding member of the ASC. Fisher was described by the Religious Roundtable as a “close friend,” as was brewery magnate Joseph Coors, also of the ASC.[29] Coors was also a former student of Phillps Exeter Academy.

Weyrich made clear that it was the schools issue that launched the organization. Dartmouth professor Randall Balmer has demonstrated that while the rise of the Christian Right was not attributable to opposition to abortion, but to the issue finally chosen by Weyrich: school segregation. Weyrich argued that social or family issues would be to conservatives in the 1980s what Vietnam or the environment was to liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[30] However, Weyrich was having difficulty identifying the specific catalyst that would mobilize Christian voters. By his own account, for nearly two decades Weyrich tested different issues: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.[31]

Ultimately, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed “the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape”: evangelicals.[32] As Weyrich explained:

The conservative movement, up to that point, was essentially an intellectual movement. It had some very powerful thinkers, but it didn’t have many troops. And as Stalin said of the Pope, “where are his divisions?” Well, we didn’t have many divisions. When these folks became active, all of a sudden the conservative movement had lots of divisions. We were able to move literally millions of people. And this is something that we had literally no ability to do prior to that time.[33]

Weyrich reasoned that if he could tap into the Christian community, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc. “The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich determined that the political possibilities of developing such potential were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”[34]

The Moral Majority was a relatively early supporter of Reagan, with Falwell announcing the organization’s endorsement before the Republican convention. According to Jimmy Carter, “that autumn [1980] a group headed by Jerry Falwell purchased $10 million in commercials on southern radio and TV to brand me as a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.”[35] After Reagan’s victory, Falwell announced Reagan’s success was directly due to the Moral Majority and others registering and encouraging church-goers to vote who had never before been politically active.[36] By 1982, Moral Majority surpassed Christian Voice in size and influence, and became one of the largest conservative lobby groups in the United States. At its height, it claimed more than four million members and over two million donors.[37] Nationally, the Moral Majority encouraged electoral participation among its members and used registration drives to register church-goers to vote. Leaders within the Moral Majority asked ministers provide their congregants political direction, reminding congregants when to vote, who to vote for, and why the Moral Majority held particular positions on issues.[38]

Arthur’s Boys

Despite their posturing for “family values” and against homosexuality, the Republican far right is rampant with the tendency. As noted by Joe Conason in “The GOP’s crowded closet,” there has been a long history of anti-gay Republicans being secretly homosexuals. “Somewhere in the textbooks of psychosexual pathology there may be a straightforward answer, so to speak. Does the party draw closeted men because they can hide behind Republican homophobia? Or does the party promote homophobia as a political ruse while closeted men run the show?”[39]

Terry Dolan’s mentor was legendary Republican strategist and closeted homosexual, Arthur J. Finkelstein, the renowned Republican political consultant who worked for NCPAC and dozens of Republican senators. Finkelstein, who was inducted into the hall of fame for pollsters and political consultants, revolutionized campaign polling and financing and helped elect a number of conservative candidates, including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.[40] While a student at Columbia University, Finkelstein interviewed and helped produce radio programs for Ayn Rand, and was a volunteer at the New York headquarters of the Draft Goldwater Committee in 1963–64.

Finkelstein was known for his attack-dog strategies, referred to as “Finkel-think.” After Finkelstein, “liberal” became a pejorative. Finkelstein pioneered demographic analyses of primary voters and exit polling. Using a strategy called “microtargeting,” Finkelstein would bombard specific groups of potential supporters with appeals to support a candidate through direct mail and phone calls, coupled with television ads that mercilessly attacked a rival’s vulnerabilities.[41]

 “Arthur was responsible for electing more people to the United States Senate than any other political consultant,” Alfonse M. D’Amato said in an interview.[42] Finkelstein helped elect or re-elect not only D’Amato, but Republican Senators James L. Buckley, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Finkelstein worked with Helms and Tom Ellis to establish the National Congressional Club. “Without Arthur Finkelstein, Ronald Reagan might never have become president of the United States,” historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley wrote for the National Review in January 2017.[43]

Roger Stone, Dolan and another legendary dirty trickster, Lee Atwater, all learned their trade from Finkelstein, known worldwide, as “The Merchant of Venom,” and came to be known as “Arthur’s Boys.”[44] Stone, who had also been a member of YAF, was devastated by Goldwater’s defeat but remained fully devoted to the party. Stone says he became a Republican in 1964 at age 12, after a neighbor gave him a copy of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. At 19, Stone helped Nixon’s campaign by using the pseudonym Jason Rainier to donate money to Paul McCloskey, Nixon’s challenger for the Republican nomination, and signed the funds under the Young Socialist Alliance and “leaked” the receipt to the press. Stone was implicated in the Watergate scandal, and according to his friend and eventual law partner and Donald Trump’s future campaign manager, Paul Manafort, “They embellished what was a twenty-year old kid’s role into being the mastermind of Watergate. Roger saw the opportunity to build a reputation off of being viewed as that politically significant…”[45] Stone rose through the ranks of youth groups like Teenage Republicans, College Republicans, Young Republicans, and the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was founded in 1973 by the American Conservative Union (ACU) and the YAF.

Charlie Black is a “longtime Washington lobbyist” who “worked in every Republican presidential campaign” since 1972.[46] In 1964, Black, then a senior in a North Carolina high school, saw his parents follow the wave of Dixiecrats shifting their allegiance to the Republican Party. “There was a general feeling of resistance or rebellion among white southerners to LBJ Lyndon B. Johnson, to the things he was doing,” Black said. “I wasn’t conversant with the policies, or why the civil rights act was bad, but it caused me to focus on it.”[47] In 1972, Black was a campaign worker in the first senatorial campaign of Jesse Helms.

Super PACs

Finkelstein the chief strategist behind National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), founded by Stone, Black and Dolan, with help from Richard Viguerie and Thomas Ellis, in 1975. The PACs were designed to bypass campaign finance reforms instituted after Watergate. According to Stone, Campaign donations were limited to $5,000. “But the loophole was,” explains Stone, “we could advertise on behalf of a candidate, without their cooperation or coordination, an unlimited amount. And that’s why NCPAC was successful.”[48] Stone confessed, “NCPAC was transformative in the sense that we really pioneered negative campaign advertising in massive doses to win elections.”[49] According to Dolan, referring to the efficacy of these tactics, “I’m convinced at some point with these types of programs you could elect Mickey Mouse to the house or the Senate.”[50]

According to Jeffrey Toobin, “Roger was one of the inventors of the modern political system, the PACs, the Super PACs. That is where Roger has made his influence and it continues to be felt.”[51] In 1976, Stone worked in Reagan’s campaign for president, and in 1977, became national chairman of the Young Republicans. As explains Manafort, “When we elected Roger we moved the Republican Party in a more ideological direction. Up until that point it was straddling the old Republican establishment, and the new conservative movement that started in the Barry Goldwater days. We built on that and I think when Roger was elected chairman of the Young Republicans, that was sort of the piece that finalized everything.”[52] Stone identified the “Reagan Democrat” and wrote the strategy to appeal to blue-collar and Catholic vote, which was critical in winning states that were not traditionally Republican.

In 1979 Time magazine characterized NCPAC, the Conservative Caucus and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress headed by Paul Weyrich, as the three most important ultraconservative organizations making up the New Right.[53] NCPAC was a major contributor to the ascendancy of conservative Republicans in the early 1980s, including the election of Ronald Reagan as President.

In 1996, Boston Magazine outed Finkelstein as a homosexual in a feature story.[54] Finkelstein, who often emphasizing their opposition to gay rights and in particular to gay marriage, recently married his male partner. Dolan, who lived for a time with Stone and his wife, was a vocal proponent of family values and led organizations persistently critical of gay rights, was revealed to have been a closeted homosexual who frequented gay bars in Washington, D.C.[55] He died from complications of AIDS at the age of 36.

Similarly, CPAC has collaborated with the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), an organization that works within the Republican Party to advocate equal rights for LGBT people in the United States. It was founded in 1977 in California as a rallying point for Republicans opposed to the Briggs Initiative, which attempted to ban homosexuals from teaching in public schools. Ronald Reagan publicly expressed his opposition to the discriminatory policy, which played an influential role in the eventual defeat of the Initiative. In the midst of this victory, gay conservatives in California created the Log Cabin Republicans. LCR acts under the statement: “We are loyal Republicans. We believe in limited government, strong national defense, free markets, low taxes, personal responsibility, and individual liberty. Log Cabin Republicans represents an important part of the American family—taxpaying, hard working people who proudly believe in this nation’s greatness. We also believe all Americans have the right to liberty and equality.”[56]

Black, Manafort and Stone

Stone and Manafort founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly in 1980. Black, Manafort and Stone was one of the first political consulting firms to work for Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy in 1980, and would later also have extensive connections to the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Black worked for a succession of Republican presidential campaigns from 1976 to 1992, including those of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His first hire on the Reagan campaign was Lee Atwater, whom he met during the course of his work with the Republican National Committee in 1972. Atwater became a senior partner in Black, Manafort and Stone the day after the 1984 presidential election.[57] The arrangement required Atwater to only work five or six days a month for the firm while completed a thesis on negative campaigning for his PhD.[58]

Atwater, who became Reagan’s campaign advisor, was the original master of “dirty tricks” politics, once called the “Babe Ruth of negative politics.”[59] During the 1970s and the 1980 election, Atwater rose to prominence in the South Carolina Republican Party, actively participating in the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. As a student at Newberry College, he took charge of the College Republicans National Committee, which under his leadership became a national force. Before leaving school to work for Thurmond, Atwater orchestrated the campaign of Karl Rove, his protégé, in a bid to take over the College Republicans. Atwater made a name for himself in when he worked on Thurmond’s tough election bid in 1978, a campaign run by Stone and Finkelstein. Atwater came to national attention when he was he was regional political director for Reagan’s presidential run.[60] In 1981, Thurmond got Atwater a job at the White House under Reagan, where he become Deputy Assistant to Ed Rollins, a campaign consultant and advisor who has worked on several high-profile political campaigns in the United States. Rollins was part of a group of advisors who made the decision to use the neo-Nazi Republican Heritage Groups.[61]

Reagan’s campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the “welfare state” and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action.[62] Atwater discussed this “Southern Strategy” in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”[63]

In 1976, Manafort was the delegate-hunt coordinator for eight states for the President Ford Committee run by James A. Baker III. Between 1978 and 1980, Manafort was the southern coordinator for Reagan’s presidential campaign, and the deputy political director at the Republican National Committee. After Reagan’s election in November 1980, Manafort was appointed Associate Director of the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House. As the political director of the GOP convention in Dallas, Manafort had arranged Reagan’s speech to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered by the Klan in 1964.[64]

Reagan’s visit at Neshoba was hosted by Trent Lott, a 33º Scottish Rite Freemason, at the time a Mississippi congressman.[65] In his relatively short speech, Reagan made an overt appeal to the Southern Strategy, and declared, “I believe in states’ rights… And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”[66]

“Since then,” according to the New York Times, Black, Manafort and Stone has become a power broker that thrives on a hardball approach.”[67] Jane Mayer wrote, “When people think of Washington corruption, they think of organizations like Black, Manafort and Stone that shook down dictators, took all their money, and then tried to take America’s government and make them serve the dictators’ interests. You know, it is the swamp.”[68] Its client list included Salomon Brothers, Kaman Aerospace and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The firm has represented, and lobbied the US Congress on behalf of numerous foreign governments and dictatorships including Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and Jonas Savimbi of Angola.[69] During the 1988 presidential campaign in the US, it was disclosed that Black, Manafort retained the island nation of the Bahamas as a client at a time its leadership was being attacked for alleged ties to drug smugglers.[70]

[1] Donald T. Critchlow. The conservative ascendancy: how the GOP right made political history, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 2011).

[2] Richard Viguerie. “Senator Jesse Helms was the Leader of the New Right.” Christian Newswire (July 4, 2003).

[3] Jerome Himmelstein, p. 97; Sara Diamond. Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Religious Right (South End Press, Boston, MA), p. 49–50.

[4] Victoria Clark. Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 189.

[5] Ibid., p. 249.

[6] Ira Chinoy and Robert G. Kaiser. “Decades of Contributions to Conservatism.” Washington Post (May 2, 1999).

[7] Alan Bloom, “Preface,” Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p i.

[8] Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews”; cited in Shadia Drury. Leo Strauss and the American Right. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 41.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Shadia Drury. Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) p. 63.

[11] Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; cited in Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 63.

[12] Shadia Drury. Leo Strauss and the American Right, p. 62.

[13] Craig Shirley. Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (Thomas Nelson, 2005), p. 176.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Robert Liebman & Robert Wuthnow. The New Christian Right (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1983), p. 58.

[16] Chris Ladd. “Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican.” Forbes (March 27, 2017).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Richard A. Viguerie. The new Right: we’re ready to lead (Viguerie Co., 1980).

[19] Jerome L. Himmelstein. To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 83.

[20] Richard Viguerie. “Richard Viguerie: William Buckley Gave Birth to the Conservative Movement and Changed the Course of History.” Christian Newswire (February 27, 2008).

[21] Lee Edwards. The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America (Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 152.

[22] Manuel G. Gonzales & Richard Delgado. Politics of Fear: How Republicans Use Money, Race and the Media to Win (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 12.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Sharlet. The Family, p. 258.

[25] Paul A. Djupe & Laura R. Olson. Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics (Facts on File, Inc., 2003), p. 99.

[26] Melissa Rossi. What Every American Should Know About Who’s Really Running America (Penguin, 2007).

[27] Betty Clermont. The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2009).

[28] Peter Jesserer Smith. “Catholics Bid Farewell to Pro-Life Lion Howard Phillips.” National Catholic Register (May 6, 2013).

[29] Bellant. The Coors Connection, p. 50.

[30] Paul Weyrich. “Reshaping the Political Debate: Cultural Conservatism and American Politics,” Election Politics 4 (Fall 1987): 15-16.

[31] Randall Balmer. “The Real Origins of the Religious Right.” Politico (May 27, 2014).

[32] David Grann. “Robespierre Of The Right.” New Republic (October 26, 1997).

[33] Adam Curtis, “The Power of Nightmares,” BBC documentary.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Jimmy Carter. White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). p. 469.

[36] Clyde Wilcox. God’s Warriors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 96.

[37] Clyde Wilcox. Onward Christian Soldiers? (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 96.

[38] Liebman & Wuthnow. The New Christian Right., p. 37.

[39] Joe Conason. “The GOP’s crowded closet.” Salon (August 31, 2007).

[40] Sam Roberts. “Arthur Finkelstein, Innovative, Influential Conservative Strategist, Dies at 72.” New York Times (August 19, 2017).

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid.

[43] As cited in Matt Schudel. “Arthur Finkelstein, quietly influential GOP campaign mastermind, dies at 72.” Washington Post (August 19, 2017).

[44] Howard Fineman. “Get Ready To Rumble.” Newsweek (September 15, 1996).

[45] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[46] David Whitford. “The evolution of John McCain.” Fortune (June 28, 2008).

[47] Thomas B. Edsall. “Partners in Political PR Firm Typify Republican New Breed.” Washington Post (April 7, 1985).

[48] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid.

[53] “The New Right Takes Aim.” Time magazine (August 20, 1979).

[54] Michael Finnegan. “GOP GURU GAY, SEZ MAG,” New York Daily News, (September 13, 1996).

[55] Steve Endean. Bringing Lesbian And Gay Rights Into the Mainstream: Twenty Years of Progress (Haworth Press, 2006), p. 269.

[56] “Log Cabin Republicans: What We Believe.” Log Cabin Republicans.

[57] Julian Zelizer. “Dirty campaigning? He perfected it.” CNN (March 25, 2016).

[58] Thomas B. Edsall. “Partners in Political PR Firm Typify Republican New Breed.” Washington Post (April 7, 1985).

[59] Julian Zelizer. “Dirty campaigning? He perfected it.” CNN (March 25, 2016).

[60] Dennis W. Johnson. Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (Oxford University Press, 2017). p. 137.

[61] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 24.

[62] Antonio D’Ambrosio. “Lee Atwater’s Legacy.” The Nation (October 8, 2008).

[63] Alexander P. Lamis. Southern Politics in the 1990s (Louisiana State University Press, 1999). pp. 7–8.

[64] Robert P. Jones. “How Trump Remixed the Republican 'Southern Strategy’.” The Atlantic (August 4, 2016).

[65] Citizens’ Council Collection (MUM00072). Archives & Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library, (The University of Mississippi); Joseph Crespino. Strom Thurmond’s America: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); “Bio: Trent Lott.” CBS News (February 11, 2009).

[66] Robert P. Jones. “How Trump Remixed the Republican 'Southern Strategy’.” The Atlantic (August 4, 2016).

[67] “A Political Power Broker.” New York Times (June 21, 1989).

[68] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[69] “Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, Public Affairs Company document for U.S. Department of Justice.” U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA.gov); Jack Anderson and Dale van Atta. “Mobutu in Search of an Image Boost”. Washington Post (September 25, 1989).

[70] “A Political Power Broker.”

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia