Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Good overview from Tamsin Shaw through ByLine Times of how the US and UK politics, funding, networking and campaigning, crosses over with various oligarchs, groups and nations, of dubious outlook.

Influence of Koch Network’s faux libertarian or free market think tanks, joined with nativism of Tanton Network faux environmentalism, media cartels led by Murdoch et al including Musk, Christian Conservatives and influencers, on latter the Council for National Policy.

Now, post Brexit and Trump analysts are seeing the architecture of influence using technology to help its cause whether in legacy media, online or social media to promote deeply nativist Christian authoritarian policies, as ‘conservative’, to help the cause of oligarch donors or investors, flying under the radar or astroturfing. 

‘Political Technology’ and the Transatlantic Alt-Right: The Data We Should All Know About

Inspired by Anne Nelson’s book, Tamsin Shaw dissects the history of America’s Council for National Policy and its connections to Brexit, Trump, Russia and the revelations of Edward Snowden

TAMSIN SHAW

29 JUN 2023

Everyone in Britain should have heard of America’s Council for National Policy (CNP). Anne Nelson has shown in her vital book Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, that the most powerful leaders on the radical right in America emerged from this secretive organization. Lists of members have sometimes been leaked.

They include Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Ginni Thomas, Ali Alexander, and other supporters of the 2021 attempted coup in the States. The core of its membership has been constituted for decades by America’s big billionaire families, the DeVoses, the Princes, the Kochs, the Mercers and so on. This concentration of power and influence might be reason enough for the British people to be aware of the CNP. But its members have also been surreptitiously active in the UK for over a decade, with undeniable impact.

Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, both CNP members, will be known to readers of Byline Times for their involvement with Cambridge Analytica, (Mercer owned it; Bannon ran it), which was responsible for the data operations behind Brexit and the Trump campaign. But their operations on the ground in the UK are much more extensive. Bannon has often said that Brexit and Trump’s election were “one event”. The groundwork had been laid for a long time.

Bannon started grooming Nigel Farage around 2011. Farage loved it, of course. Although he’d enjoyed several years of being amused by his own speeches in the European Parliament, as a right-wing nationalist provocateur he was treated like an oaf by his weary multilingual colleagues. In 2012, just after Bannon had been appointed by Andrew Breitbart to be executive editor of the right-wing website Breitbart News, he invited Farage to Washington and New York to meet his powerful American friends.

When Farage later told a New Yorker reporter, “I have got a very, very high regard for that man’s brain,” it was hard not to hear it as an exclamation of gratitude. After all, Bannon set him on a path to having a successful show on RT (formerly Russia Today), having meetings with the Russian ambassador to the UK, being the victorious champion for his cherished cause, Brexit, and on first-name terms with the President of the United States.

But while Bannon is known for cultivating people like Farage, Raheem Kassam of Breitbart, even Boris Johnson, it was Robert Mercer who paved the way by astroturfing a transatlantic right-wing movement.

Peter Jukes is one of the few people to have exposed this aspect of their activities. Mercer sponsored the Young Americas Foundation and its offshoot, the Young Britons Foundation, with a typical American far-right agenda. In 2013, Jukes tells us, they met for a conference in Cambridge and discussed, amongst other things, their preferred candidate for Prime Minister, with Boris Johnson being the favourite. Raheem Kassam and other prominent Brexit supporters were amongst them.

2013, Jukes points out, was a critical year for establishing the influence campaigns they would benefit from. As Putin was making plans to take Crimea, Yevgeny Prigozhin (now notorious for being head of the Wagner Group) set up the Internet Research Agency to deploy social media influence operations. In Britain, Chris Wylie and Alexander Nix were setting up the Cambridge branch of SCL Group, the strategic communications company that would become Cambridge Analytica.

It was also a critical year for the relationship between the US far right and Russia. The affinity between the views of the American right and those of Putin was openly declared by self-described “paleo-conservative”, Pat Buchanan, who shocked many traditional conservatives with the claim that he, like Putin, saw Obama’s America as the greatest source of evil in the world. Putin is an ally, he wrote, in the struggle against “the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”

The passage of anti-gay legislation in Russia, as well as a shared loathing for the liberal Pope Francis, created more common ground. Buchanan particularly praised the joint American-Russian organization, the World Congress of Families (WCF), for pioneering cooperation. The chair of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (a far-right Catholic organization of which Bannon is a patron), Italian politician Luca Volonte, is a WCF official, as is the Institute’s trustee and former Breitbart contributor, Austin Ruse.

But though Buchanan was then the face of this US-Russian relationship, he was far from being the fulcrum on which it would turn. To understand the real power brokers, we have to go back the CNP and their decades of activism.’

For more article and blogs on Conservatives, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics and White Nationalism click through:

Putin’s Russia – Dugin – Alt Right – White Christian Nationalism – the Anglosphere and Europe

Lobby Groups, Policy, Government and Influence

DeSmog: Council for National Policy

Putin’s Supporters in Europe and Anglosphere: Willing Dupes and Useful Idiots?

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

Good Reads: Anne Nelson – Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right

Good Reads: Katherine Stewart – The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction.  Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Koch, Murdoch, DeVos, Scaife, Mellon, Mercer et al.

Although changing, the latter have leverage amongst more baby boomers and older who are no longer in the workforce, have retirement income, less educated, lack of critical literacies, access legacy media and now seem swayed by existential socio-cultural threats via (pensioner) populism; has been observed in Europe too.  Part of the pro Brexit agitprop was informing older ‘working class’ voters that yes, there would be some economic deterioration in leaving the EU, Customs Zone etc.; the same cohort’s with short term horizons, will not pay the price nor deal with future consequences of their own ‘working class’ children of working age…..

Unfortunately, a symptom of this new politics, riding on the last of the less diverse age cohorts, is how to remain in power, hence, we observe voter suppression, intimidation or silencing of alternative voices, most media is right wing or conservative, while younger generations facing higher taxes and fewer state benefits or services.

From CARR The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right:

‘After Serving Corporations For Decades, GOP Pivots To Fake Populism

Leonard Weinberg May 5 2021

For many years its liberal and Democratic critics depicted the Republican Party as the party of ‘big business.’ These critics claimed that the GOP’s principal role at both the national and state levels of partisan political activity was to advance the material interests of the country’s large corporate sector.

GOP spokespeople often sought to obscure this reality by appealing to voters based on a defense of American ‘individualism’ (i.e. do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it), by extolling patriotism, especially the country’s military prowess, and by condemning Democratic rivals as ‘soft on communism’ and enemies of traditional American values. Such electoral appeals were successful for much of the last century and well into the present.

For many liberal critics, the linkage between the Republican Party and business, especially large-scale enterprise, was presumptively based on a patron/client relationship. Business leaders were patrons who called the shots, and GOP politicians were clients, ready to do the bidding of captains of business and commerce, with some quibbling now and then, in exchange for a steady stream of financial support.

The relationship between these two key forces in American public life may not be broken, but certainly seems to have become attenuated.  Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), issued a threat: If America’s business leaders don’t stop publicly opposing the Party’s new Georgia election law (restricting access to the polls by the state’s sizeable Black population), they will have to face the consequences.

McConnell and other congressional Republicans went on to criticize ‘big business’ for supporting environmental protection policies and the Democrats’ social agenda, including women’s rights.

McConnell later tried to clarify his remarks but Republican Governor Ron DeSantis doubled down on this sentiment and appeared to issue another threat.

What’s going on? And why at this time?

First, consider the socio-political situation of the GOP. One long-time base of voter support appears to be eroding. Not all that long ago, the GOP tended to attract better-educated segments of the population, including so-called ‘country club’ Republicans. Outside the South, this is no longer so, or much less so than it once was. College-educated young voters (18 to 34 year-olds), women especially, are far more liberal on a host of issues (e.g. gay marriage, environmental protection) than older, more judgmental age cohorts.

Linked to this shift in the outlook of better-educated voters is a profound change in the organization of the American economy. During the century that followed the end of the Civil War (1865), the strongest and most influential sectors of the economy were either extractive (coal mining, oil refining) or industrial (steel-making, automobile manufacture). Today the economy tends to be dominated by high tech firms (Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) and by business firms whose corporate headquarters are located outside the United States (Toyota, Volkswagen, Sony) and whose executives have a more cosmopolitan outlook than their American-based predecessors.

To a significant extent, the world in which the linkage between ‘big business’ and the Republican Party developed no longer exists. That linkage belongs to an earlier age and so does the rhetoric of its long-standing liberal critics.

Second, the GOP’s electoral base seems to have shifted and aged. Thanks in part to former President Trump’s ability to win the support of ‘low information’ voters–individuals with less than a college education who are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories– the Republican Party is now shaped by politicians able to give voice to the biases and grievances of this substantial constituency.

This electoral ‘base’ is strongly skewed towards aging white males, particularly those living in small towns and rural areas, whose social values and economic circumstances appear frozen in time. From the point of view of GOP decision-makers, the concern is that over time this ‘base’ will continue to shrink in size, making it progressively more difficult for the Party to win national elections. How then can the GOP appeal to a wider spectrum of voters without alienating its current core constituency? The GOP seeks to resolve this dilemma via voter suppression, using state laws to discourage young university students and people of color away from the polls.

This tactic, apparently triggered by the Party’s 2020 fiasco in Georgia, may bring temporary success, assuming the legislation is upheld by the courts. But it also represents a declaration of independence from the Party’s traditional support within the country’s business and social elite.

We are witnessing the vulgarization of the GOP, achieved at the cost of weakening the Party’s long-standing patron/client relationship with the country’s corporate leadership. As a substitute, the GOP has developed sophisticated ways of raising money from small contributors via the internet, stoking fears of impending doom if money is not forthcoming. At the same time, the Party continues to strengthen its links with idiosyncratic billionaires, e.g. the Koch Brothers, and the Mellon and DeVos families, families with strong ideological commitments to shrinking government (except for the military) and the public sector in general.

Under these changing conditions, it should not come as a complete surprise to note the appearance of “Biden Republicans”– traditional Republican supporters, alienated by Trump and his base who have chosen to switch their commitments. The fact that Bill and Melinda Gates have become favorite targets of right-wing attacks and conspiratorial inventions should tell us something about the GOP’s direction.’

Professor Leonard Weinberg is a Senior Fellow at CARR and an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada. 

For more related blogs and articles click through Australian Politics, Conservative, Demography, Economics, Evangelical Christianity, Government Budgets, Libertarian Economics, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian, White Nationalism and Younger Generations.