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Neocon Convergences

By Salim Muwakkil

The Bradley Foundation is the right’s economic fount for ideas promoting neoracist empire.

A funny thing happened while following the money trail of the neoconservatives who have hijacked U.S. foreign policy. The path led to a network of financial and intellectual resources that also is dedicated to neoracism.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has been the economic fount for the neoconservative notions of global affairs now ascendant in the Bush administration. According to a report by Media Transparency, from 1995 to 2001 the Milwaukee-based foundation provided about $14.5 million to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the think tank most responsible for incubating and nourishing the ideas of the neocon movement.

The Bradley Foundation also made grants totaling nearly $1.8 million to help fund the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the influential group that had urged an invasion of Iraq since its 1997 founding. PNAC, headed by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, boasts a membership that includes many players in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

The Bradley foundation also helped fund Samuel P. Huntington’s neocon classic The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, a book that brought the domestic culture wars to the global stage. Hitting a familiar, Eurocentric note, Huntington’s book argued that the Judeo-Christian “West” is the protagonist in an epic struggle of civilizations against the “other” (this time the Islamic East). For a group that supposedly has left Marxist thinking behind, these neoconservatives are rigidly dialectic.

All of this wouldn’t much alarm me; after all, the battlefield of ideas is as good a place to fight as any. But then I began to notice other beneficiaries of Bradley’s largess since 1995, and I found some troubling patterns. The foundation has provided nearly $2 million to the National Association of Scholars, which played a key role in the anti-affirmative action campaign known as the Californian Civil Rights Initiative and regularly questions black-oriented scholarship. It has also given $1.8 million to help fund the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, a group that provides guidance and support for 70 right-wing campus papers across the country.

The Bradley Foundation seems to have a soft spot in its heart for the kind of neoracist ideas that have gained currency in recent years. It has heavily subsidized authors like Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza, whose work on welfare and race has reinforced ancient stereotypes. Murray’s book Losing Ground argued that poverty is the result of personal failings and thus most government anti-poverty programs should be eliminated. And his book The Bell Curve (written with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein) argued that poverty is the result of genetic traits of a subclass of human beings. These arguments were deployed to help convince conservative legislators of the futility of affirmative action and other compensatory social programs. After all, if African-Americans are genetically incapable of achieving racial equality, we must rethink the goals of the civil rights movement.

David Horowitz, one of neoconservatism’s most incendiary racial provocateurs, has raked in nearly $4.5 million in grants from the Bradley Foundation for his think tank, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Horowitz’s combative tactics seem designed to ratchet up tensions between blacks and Jews, a theme that seems to be a Bradley favorite.

It’s clear to me that the Bradley Foundation has forged a link between a neo-imperialist foreign policy and a neoracist domestic policy, and that it provides generous funding to push these views in both realms. And Bradley is just one of other like-minded foundations such as the Koch Family Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation, groups examined in the report “Buying a Movement: Right Wing Foundations and American Politics,” by People for the American Way.

The link that connects these views is the notion that Western civilization is both the global ideal and the world’s official arbiter. It’s an old notion: white supremacy unhinged—the same notion that justified the original imperialism and slavery. What’s particularly troubling to me is the lack of domestic concern about this connection. Did the world not reach a consensus on the dangers of racist reasoning and military aggression following World War II?

That neocons are galvanized by race is no surprise. One of the founding documents of neoconservatism is Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” In that famous Commentary essay, Podhoretz’s comments helped create a gap between blacks and Jews that has yet to be bridged. Among other things, he suggested that the solution to America’s racial problem would be for blacks to accept miscegenation as an unobtrusive form of genocide.

Victims of these evils see the link between neo-imperialism and neoracism much more easily than the victimizers. And they fear this axis of evil much more than the one concocted by Bush’s speech writers. That’s likely one reason black Americans resisted overwhelming media propaganda and opposed the Iraq invasion. The funding priorities of the Bradley Foundation show those fears are not misplaced.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

More information about Salim Muwakkil

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  • Reader Comments

    Very good article. Thank you.

    I have a question when it comes to financing our country’s move toward theo-fascism. I know you can find tons of information on the Moon organization’s connections, financing and in general working with the conservative movement and the leadership of the Republican party. He has spent BILLIONS propping up and maneuvering right wing thought over the last couple decades, in particular. This is the same “Rev.” Moon who claims he’s the Messiah and plans on eventually controlling our country and the world. The cash comes from overseas and the origins are never revealed in any detail, because his group has never been made to fall under FARA, as I believe the should.

    FARA
    http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fara/

    The Washington Times, for instance, has NEVER made a profit, losing tens of millions yearly. Moon’s organization literally works with the republican party to drive us toward a more theocratic government…

    Don’t believe me? Read this, and pay close attention to what it says about David Caprara, who Bush just named to head VISTA. Everything I have read says that members of Moon’s organization have one goal, put the group/Moon in charge of the world.
    http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs6013.htm

    Posted by Arnold Ziffle on Jun 8, 2003 at 1:34 PM

    con’d

    I am just hitting some high spots here...and NO ONE talks about it. Not even the so-called ‘liberals’ who say they see the right, as it has evolved, as a destructive element in today’s society, not a PEEP. Even if you buy that Moon that his ‘church’ is a religion and you don’t see him as a dangerous megalomaniac, why are the republicans/conservatives working with a group like this?  With these goals? For a party which is record setting in the hypocrisy department, this is the Grandest Hypocrisy of Them All.

    In fact, this story is an epic and everybody acts like it isn’t there.

    I know Moon has snagged a democrat or two into his web over the years. But the conservatives have given the Moon organization a place at the table of influence in our country. Moon was a VIP guest at the Reagan-Bush inaugural. Bush 41 has traveled the world giving speeches honoring Moon. Bush 41 called Moon, “the man with the vision.” Moon dislikes democracy as much as he does communism, he says the only way is for the world to follow him and his group under a theocracy...he has called America ‘Satan’s harvest”....some ‘vision’ wouldn’t you say?

    Does anyone think that without the Washington Times being there to nurture these extremists over the decades, that the election of 2000 would have been close enough to steal? Think back over the years. For instance, guess which paper was the first to print the lie about AF1 being trashed? It goes on and on.

    NO MOON NO BUSH. It is as simple as that....Moon predicted presidents would have to go through him to become president, and in Bush’s case that is a FACT. (Moon created, printed and distributed 30 millions voter ‘scorecards’ for Poppy during the ‘88 election, didn’t cost Poppy or the repubs a cent.)

    Posted by Arnold Ziffle on Jun 8, 2003 at 1:35 PM

    Can you tell me why, knowing that the Moon organization has bankrolled the conservative movement to the tune of BILLIONS, ...that is BILLIONS with a B, why is it NEVER discussed, even by the left? Their hundreds of sources of information which document this activity. The number one manipulator of our political system declares he is the Messiah in 40 newspapers across the country, he is in bed with the Bushes and the republican party and NOT A PEEP. You know what I mean, yes, the information is there but THE PUBLIC doesn’t know beans about it. Ask anyone on the street if they remember Moon and they will tell you he is gone away or that only a few ‘nuts’ still follow him. Ask them.

    Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham was asked by Moon to help influence the Reagan administration’s decision on Star Wars. According to Graham, people in the administration didn’t support SDI in 1982. Moon not only used his paper, he paid 200 grand to make a propaganda film supporting SDI. Even had Charlatan Heston in it and, you guessed it, Ronnie likes movies so the country pissed away a hundred billion or so. Even if you believe Start Wars is the right policy, do you think those decisions should be made by Generals, who have been advisors to the president, in consultation with “Rev.” Moon? Where Moon is given the power to tip the balance in our system? He isn’t a citizen. Maybe I should repeat this, an advisor to the president went to “Rev.” Moon to influence the decision on Star Wars. As Moon put it in a 1991 speech, “Father gave his support and Reagan announced it.” (Moon claims he and his wife are the “True Parents” of all mankind, here to fulfill the job Jesus didn’t get done. Thus the “father’ reference, he was speaking of himself.)

    Read this if you have been caught in the word games which claim The Washington Times is ‘independent’ of Moon. It tells some of the story about who tipped the balance on Star Wars and talks about the editors who quit because Moon was molding the paper. (he recently said he intends for the Washington Times to teach the country about God. Moon said God, personally, declared him to be the messiah.)

    From Frontline:
    http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/moontranscript.shtml

    Posted by Arnold Ziffle on Jun 8, 2003 at 1:36 PM

    I’ve got news for you folks on the left, you can spitter and sputter all you want, but until the country deals with this, all the rest is useless.

    Oh, did I mention Moon has financed the North Koreans? He gave them ten’s of millions to keep that communist country afloat and he bought them submarines. See the Defense Intel Agency(DIA) docs at the end of this article:
    http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/101100a.html

    I have to go, there is so much more here. Why won’t the country recognize who is driving the bus? When will the conservative leadership go on FOX and bow to their Savior?
    Moon is known to dress members up to look like historical figures, like Reagan, and have them bow fully prostrate before him. I guess it is his way of ‘visualizing’ the future he wants.
    Bush 41 called him the ‘man with the vision’...I don’t think the American public would share that vision and if they knew it was happening, I don’t think they would appreciate it.

    I will leave you with some links and couple short quotes from the 1978 congressional investigation of Moon:
    Quoting finding #3

    Among the goals of the Moon Organization is the establishment of a worldwide government in which the separation of church and state would be abolished and then would be governed by Moon and his followers.

    The findings may be found here: http://www.rickross.com/reference/unif/Unif11.html

    more from the report:

    http://www.freedomofmind.com/resource center/groups/m/moonies/fraserport.htm

    Alan Tate Wood, a former UC member who had been president of the FLF, described to the subcommittee some of Moon’s political ambitions and activities. He said that Moon, through the UC and its numerous front organizations, wanted to acquire enough influence in America to be able to “dictate policy on major issues, to influence legislation, and move into electoral politics."(228) In the United States, the political goals of the UC and those of the KCIA “overlap so thoroughly as to display no difference at all.”

    Posted by Arnold Ziffle on Jun 8, 2003 at 1:36 PM

    Do your own searches see what you find. Here are some additional links:

    Former member Steve Hassan?s Moon page, see list of hundreds of Moon front groups: http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/groups/ m/moonies

    Robert Parry, crack investigative journalist and long time Moon watcher has an excellent series on Moon. http://www.consortiumnews.com/ archive/moon.html

    Rick Ross?s Moon page with many articles no longer available from the original sources on the net. http://www.rickross.com/groups/moonie.html

    Craig Maxim former member whose was raised in the cult. His mother is still a member. Craig’s site has plenty of info and is still adding. To get a good insight into Moon read Craig’s experiences. Excellent. http://www.xmoonies.com/

    Moon moves on the United Nations http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/ analysis/1101moon.htm

    This is a site from a man who is still in the “church” and is fighting anonymously from within. http://wiserose.hp.infoseek.co.jp/exposed/exposed.htm

    Moon Primer http://www.geocities.com/nomoonies/ chronicles/a_moon_primer.html

    Posted by Arnold Ziffle on Jun 8, 2003 at 1:37 PM

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Appeared in the July 7, 2003 Issue
Also by Salim Muwakkil
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