Last fall, some people on a political discussion board where I was hanging out became interested in investigating two different kinds of suspicious right-wing activities On one hand, various posters were reporting that scare letters about Social Security and Medicare were being sent to senior citizens, apparantly both to drum up support for privatization and to scam the elderly recipients out of their lunch money. On the other, a range of underhanded tactics were being employed as part of the presidential campaign -- most notably the attempts to discredit John Kerry's service in Vietnam and his subsequent activities with Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
As we gathered information about these activities and the people behind them, I became aware of a number of surprising facts. One was that what had seemed to be two separate stories was actually a single story, with the people involved in the fund-raising scams repeatedly cross-connecting to the people carrying on the political dirty tricks. Second was that these were not marginal figures but prominent Republican activists and long-term right-wing operatives. Third was that was that most of these same individuals had an extensive record of involvement in scams and dirty tricks, often going back to the 1970's. And fourth was that many of them had been involved in other dubious right-wing activities as well, such as supporting the Nicaraguan Contras or the South African apartheid regime.
Here are a few samples of what I learned last fall:
The initial Social Security scare letter which started our investigations off came from an organization run by a man named Gary Jarmin, who turned out to have an extremely interesting history. Jarmin became a follower of Reverend Moon in 1967. In 1976, he was the co-founder of an influential conservative religious lobbying group called Christian Voice, which has a long history of employing direct-mail solicitation scare letters on topics like the Militant Homosexual Lobby.
In 1987, Christian Voice and one of Moon's own groups jointly founded the American Freedom Coalition, dedicated to restoring Moon's reputation, which had suffered from repeated exposes of his unwholesome intrusions into U.S. politics. It also lobbied for resumption of funding to the Contras and produced money-raising videos on behalf of Oliver North and Reagan's Star Wars program.
Over the years, Jarmin has used his political connections to do many favors for Moon. In 1990, he obtained a letter of support from then-president George H.W. Bush on behalf of one of Moon's projects. In 2001, he obtained a similar letter from George W. Bush endorsing a Unification Church prayer breakfast. And in 2004, the extraordinarily bizarre event where Moon crowned himself as Messiah in a room of the Dirksen Senate Office Building was initiated by Jarmin's letters to Senator Warner of Virginia, requesting the use of the space for what he described as a Washington Times Foundation awards banquet.
Research on Response Dynamics, the direct-mail firm which was the source of Jarmin's Social Security letter, also produced interesting results. It seemed that this same firm was currently sending out a very similar Medicare scare letter for a right-wing group called the National Center for Public Policy Research. It was also conducting direct-mail campaigns for the College Republican National Committee. (The College Republicans, to their credit, at least had the grace to act ashamed when it turned out that they were scamming little old ladies out of their life savings.)
But it was when I turned my attention from Gary Jarmin to "Stolen Honor," the anti-Kerry film produced by a man named Carlton Sherwood, that things really started to jump. It seemed that Sherwood was the author of a book called Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, which was part of that same attempt to rehabilitate Moon's reputation after his 1982 conviction for tax fraud. The book was issued by right-wing publisher Regnery-Gateway in 1991, but an earlier edition had previously been published by a man named Roger Fontaine. Fontaine himself had extensive connections not only to Reverend Moon, but also to several extreme right-wing organizations which had lent their support to the most oppressive Latin American regimes of the 1980's.
In particular, Fontaine's trail led to the World Anti-Communist League, an organization notorious among students of the right for its ties in the 70's and 80's to European neo-Nazis, Latin American death squads, and fanatical anti-communists everywhere. WACL was originally founded as the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League in 1954, at the same time and by the same people as Moon's Unification Church, and the two organizations had remained interlinked. From 1984 to 1986, WACL was at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal, being the principal channel through which unoffical aid was channelled to the Contras. It was at this time that Fontaine was involved with the organization.
Not every right-wing figure with disreputable associations could be directly tied to Reverend Moon, but even those who were not seemed to be part of the same pattern. For example, there was Jack Abramoff, whose name I first noticed on a list of donors to the 2000 congressional primary campaign of "Stolen Honor" spokesman Charlie Gerow. I never did pin down whether or not Abramoff had a hand in the making of "Stolen Honor," but I discovered instead that he was deeply connected with two of the groups using the fund-raising services of Response Dynamics -- the College Republicans and the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Between 1981 and 1985, Abramoff was chairman of the College Republican National Committee. During this period, he went to South Africa and formed a relationship with the National Student Federation, later exposed as a front group for South African military intelligence. In 1985 he became the nominal founder of the International Freedom Foundation, a lobbying group which worked on behalf of the South African apartheid regime and which turned out to have been created and financed by the regime itself.
More recently, Abramoff has been a high-powered Replican lobbyist and a major fund-raiser for George W. Bush. He is currently up to his neck in a scandal stemming from corruption in his oversight of Indian casino gambling, which involves, among other things, charges that he extorted contributions from the tribes for his pet causes. For example, the National Center for Public Policy Research, of which Abramoff is a director, received a donation of $1.07 million from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
Abramoff is not the only political celebrity to issue from the ranks of the College Republican National Committee. During his time as national chairman in the early 80's, the executive directors were first Grover Norquist and then Ralph Reed. Ten years earlier, the group had been even more notorious as a school for Nixonian dirty tricks. Karl Rove was executive director from 1970-72, then became chairman after defeating Terry Dolan in an election so dirty that George H.W. Bush, then Republican National Committee chairman, finally had to step in and declare Rove the winner.
As I researched additional events and individuals, these connections, and many others like them, kept mounting up. It was clear to me that I'd stumbled on something important, but I wasn't at all sure what. It couldn't exactly be called a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, since it had no secret masterminds, no apparent center, and no overriding covert agenda. But it was definitely a Vast Right-Wing Something.
Ultimately, I concluded that the key to sorting out this tangle of relationships was generational. The individuals whose activities had first caught my eye were all either Baby Boomers or just a few years older. The great majority were born in the 1940's and were crucially shaped by the Vietnam War, the Watergate era, and their dislike of the Sixties counterculture. The youngest of them, like Jack Abramoff, were born around 1955-60 and came to maturity in the early Reagan years. It was this generational cohort on the right that I was finding so amorphous and hard to define.
However, when I looked beyond the right-wing Boomers to the older figures who had been their original mentors, the picture became a great deal clearer. That earlier generation, consisting overwhelmingly of people born between 1915 and 1927, had been shaped by World War II and by the early years of the Cold War. Their most obvious unifying characteristic was a fanatical anti-communism, combined with a conviction of the necessity of using unconventional -- and even profoundly immoral -- methods in what they perceived as a struggle to the death.
The problem for anyone who still maintains those attitudes today is that the world which shaped them no longer exists. The red menace is gone, and the cold warriors who dedicated their lives to fighting it are growing old, retiring, and dying. The Boomers, at most, got in on the last act of the anti-communist drama -- when it had degenerated into propping up Latin American death squads, South African racists, and Afghan terrorists -- but their own personal bogeymen are hippies and protestors, feminism and gay rights, affirmative action and environmental regulation, and everything else that they couldn't handle back in 1970.
This, I believe, explains why the Boomer right is both so amorphous
and so unscrupulous. They perceive themselves to be engaged in a
no-holds-barred fight against powerful and insidious enemies -- but the
enemies they see around them are ghosts, and the methods they use are destroying
the social fabric of America, destroying the party system, and threatening
to destroy democracy itself.
Cory Panshin
January 2005
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