Further Reading

Pick One
** Watching the Right: Other People & Groups Worth Watching   Watching the Right: Organizations   Watching the Right: Congresspeople   Resources for Fighting the Right

March 1999

Watching the Right: Other People & Groups Worth Watching

By Giacomo Tramontagna

Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., the Christian Reconstructionist heir to the Home Savings and Loan fortune, sits on the boards of both the Rutherford Institute and R.J. Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, and acts as a philanthropist to far-right causes.

Rep. Dick Armey, the troglodytic Republican House Majority Leader, acted as Newt Gingrich's right-hand man in shepherding the Contract with America through the House of Representatives.

Sen. John Ashcroft, a psalm-singing member of the Assemblies of God who begins each work day with an office prayer session, was being groomed as a Republican Presidential candidate by the Christian Coalition until he recently withdrew from the race amid speculation that he feared scrutiny of financial shenanigans dating back to his terms as governor of Missouri.

William Bennett, the living embodiment of Pecksniff, the pious fraud in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, is a former Reagan-administration Secretary of Education, the head of Empower America, and a font of moral zealotry whose name is plastered all over an array of instant-uplift publications, most notably The Book of Virtues.

Joseph Coors, the Colorado beer tycoon, provided seed money for some of the most fascistic American political organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the Council on National Policy.

Jerry Falwell, Chancellor of Lynchburg Virginia's Liberty University and former head of the now-defunct Moral Majority, recently drew press attention for his assertions that the toddlers' television series Teletubbies is a Trojan horse for the homosexual agenda, and that the Antichrist is a Jewish man who walks among us.

Karen Jo Gounaud, a homosexual-hating housewife who gained recognition for efforts to stop distribution of gay newspapers at public libraries, started Family Friendly Libraries in 1995 with the aid of the Family Research Council and Citizens for Community Values, the Christian Coalition's Cincinnati chapter.

Nelson Bunker Hunt, a son of Texas oil magnate H.L. Hunt, is a national board member of the John Birch Society, a member of a racist brotherhood called the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem, and a benefactor to the Council on National Policy.

Dee Jepsen, wife of former Senator Roger Jepsen (R.-Iowa), has acted as the Reagan Administration's liaison to women's groups, co-chaired the Washington for Jesus prayer march, served on both the Board of Regents of Pat Robertson's Regent University and the steering committee of the Coalition on Revival, and is now president of Enough Is Enough, an anti-cybersmut organization whose spokesperson is born-again bimbo emeritus Donna Rice Hughes.

William Kristol, son of conservative tactician Irving Kristol and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the influential Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion magazine he co-founded in 1995 with executive editor Fred Barnes, contributing editor John Podhoretz (son of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz), and $3 million from Rupert Murdoch.

Beverly LaHaye, wife of the Council on National Policy's Tim LaHaye, is the founder and president of Concerned Women for America, the largest Christian women's political organization in the US.

Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus and Presidential candidate of the US Taxpayers Party (which seeks to abolish income tax), is a member of the Council on National Policy and a leading right-wing activist since the early 1960s.

Dan Quayle, consummate ass and longtime member of the audiocassette ministry of evangelist Colonel Thieme, was Vice President during the Bush Administration and is now a Republican candidate already campaigning for next year's Presidential election.

Richard Mellon Scaife, an eccentric Pittsburgh publisher and Mellon heir convinced that Bill Clinton murdered not only Vince Foster but the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and about 60 others, has made donations in the millions to anti-Clinton operations like the Landmark Legal Foundation and American Spectator magazine to assist in investigations of the Clintons' affairs.

Phyllis Schlafly, founder and president of Eagle Forum, widow of Fred Schlafly of the World Anti-Communist League, was a key strategist in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, and the victorious archenemy of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Kenneth Starr-- prissy son of a fire-and-brimstone Church of Christ minister and Solicitor General to the Bush Administration, Starr is best known for being the Whitewater Special Prosecutor. His $40 million investigation produced a report that reads (in the words of columnist Maureen Dowd) like "a 445-page Harold Robbins novel," Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Clinton (dick and all). Starr was proven recently to have retailored the truth to suit his needs in his dealings with Congress and the Justice Department, falsely denying any collusion with Paula Jones's legal team.

Randy Tate, the former congressman (R.-Washington) who succeeded Ralph Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition, has maintained a lower profile than the flamboyantly ambitious Reed, but has diligently presided over events like the coalition's 1998 Road to Victory conference, whose speakers included Dan Quayle, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, and Trent Lott.

Richard Viguerie, the direct mail wizard who has orchestrated the fund-raising appeals of almost every organization on the right, was co-creator (with Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and the late Terry Dolan) of the Moral Majority.

Paul Weyrich, a Catholic who has professed admiration for the pro-Nazi demagogue Father Coughlin, has long been one of the key power brokers of the far right, using seed money from Joseph Coors to create the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and subsidiary projects like National Empowerment Television and publications on the order of the hate screed The Homosexual Network by Father Enrique Rueda.