J6 ONE YEAR LATER, Ep. 6: This Was a Dress Rehearsal - with Anne Nelson
What if J6 and the Anti-CRT movements trace back to the same secretive organization? What if J6 was the result of years of planning and organizing? And what if there's a plan in place to make sure that a secretive network has the chance to pick our next president?
Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She explains how J6 was the result of a year-long strategy implemented by the Council for National Policy. Once the CNP realized that Trump would most likely not win the popular vote or the electoral college, they set in motion a plan to skew doubt on the integrity of the election. They helped organize various events and rallies calling for the election to be overturned and supported the events on the ground on J6. Afterwards, they set in motion another set of plans to win back moderate voters by convincing them that their kids's schools were teaching CRT.
Anne Nelson's Washington Spectator article: https://washingtonspectator.org/school-boards-nelson/
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By now we're all familiar with the events of January 6th, the brutal violence of the Trumpian coup attempt on our Capitol.
Yeah.
In this series, we've been looking at the religious elements of that day, the symbols, the rituals, the chants, the prayers.
But what if I told you that the plan to overtake our democracy goes back much further than January 6th or even the election of Donald Trump?
What if it goes back a generation, 40 years?
Today my guest is the journalist Ann Nelson, whose work explores the shadowy network of organizations held together by the Council for National Policy, the secretive organization founded in the 1980s by Paul Weyrich and others that has a definitive hold on our politics and our policy.
What Ann talks about is shocking.
She shows that not only did the Council for National Policy and the megadonors, the religious organizations, the politicians, and others, not only put in motion the plans for shifting emphasis from the popular vote to the electoral college, to calling into question the legitimacy of our election if Trump lost,
But since January 6th, they've been putting into place plans A, B, C, and D to make sure that they never lose hold of power in this country again.
One of the most shocking things that she reveals It's how in the wake of January 6th and the Biden presidency, the Council for National Policy has strategically sown division in America's suburbs, igniting fights surrounding critical race theory and other topics related to gender, sex, and race in order to swing suburban, middle-class, white voters back to the Republican Party.
What if I told you that the Council for National Policy has a longer view than that of the political life of Donald Trump, and that they're putting into place measures at the state level that might make it almost impossible to stop them from choosing our next president?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, excuse me, at UCSB.
And I'm joined today by a return guest, and that is Anne Nelson.
So Anne, I'll just say thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
So Anne, I'm going to embarrass you because a couple of years ago, some folks like me and you are old enough to remember that there was a beer commercial where there was a guy for Dos Equis who was the most interesting man in the world.
And they would always show him in various locales and he would say, I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis.
And when I think of Anne Nelson, I think of the most interesting person in the world.
You were a war correspondent.
In El Salvador and Guatemala in the 80s.
You wrote a play called The Guys that was then, you know, turned into a film, which is incredible.
A Guggenheim Fellow.
And that led to the great book Red Orchestra on Nazi propaganda.
Have taught at Columbia for over a decade.
Two decades.
Okay.
All right.
I didn't do the math quick enough.
I apologize.
And obviously wrote a book that I have assigned in my courses we've talked about on this show, and that is The Shadow Network, which outlines just the immense institutional network on the right that comes from the Council for National Policy all the way down to various organizations like the NRA, Susan B. Anthony List, Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, so on and so forth.
And so the Shadow Network's out in paperback.
If you have not read that book, friends, I don't know what you're doing.
You need to.
We're here to talk about J6 one year later.
I think we want to focus on what's happening sort of in the present and going forward.
So I'll just open with a quick question, which is, if people think about the Council for National Policy, Before January 6th, you know, what were some of the things that they were up to when it started to look like Trump may not win the election?
And then when the election is kind of called for Biden, November 7 and that interregnum between the called election and the and the insurrection?
Sure.
Well, first of all, people largely didn't think of the Council for National Policy.
It's what I would call a stealth organization.
And believe it or not, it had been active for some 40 years.
And mine in my book was the first book on the subject, which came out in 2019.
So that seems extraordinary to me.
But what you have is a group of Very conservative religious fundamentalists, many of them from the oil states like Texas and my native Oklahoma, combined with fossil fuel interests, combined with political operatives.
Some people might know the name Paul Weyrich.
They really ought to know it because he was somebody who saw a way to institutionalize a radical right-wing Accumulation of power.
So he was a founder of the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and all of these came together with other organizations to gradually and secretly accumulate the foundation of the building blocks of political power.
So, they worked in total secrecy for decades, where their membership was secret, their meetings were secret, and a lot of people just kind of wrote them off as yet another conservative organization that, you know, got together and whatever.
The Southern Poverty Law Center found the roster of their membership and published it, and that was from 2014.
I worked from that in my book.
Then, building on their research, my research, and other people's, the Center for Media and Democracy, and it's documented, accessed their meetings and their rosters from 20 and before so like three or four years before so what we have now on their website are the videos of their meetings and
And you can see in 2019 that they're having sessions.
And remember, this is a non-profit, so-called non-partisan, quote-unquote, educational organization, tax-exempt.
And they're holding sessions on how to win elections, how to mobilize specific voting blocs.
One of these sessions was chaired by Ginny Thomas.
This is in 2019, right?
Clarence Thomas' wife, yes.
You have people like Jenny Beth Martin, who was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, with the support of the Koch Brothers in 2010.
So you've got these sessions, and people are given action steps in these sessions.
So one very prominent member is the lawyer Cleta Mitchell, also from my native Oklahoma, who was looking at legislative and legal maneuvers to subvert the electoral process.
You had other people Who were like Kenneth Blackwell, another very prominent leading member.
He was the former Secretary of State in Ohio, and he's been very involved in various voter suppression issues and legislation.
So you've got many, many working parts working on different fronts in conjunction.
And I don't want to leave out the media component.
Because another organization that's been a core member of the Council for National Policy is Salem Media, which has content distributed to literally thousands of radio stations across the country, where their so-called news programs are called quote-unquote Christian news.
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