VIDEO: Romney Aided Fringe Utah College Founded by Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist
In 2009, the GOP candidate introduced Glenn Beck at a fundraiser for a school that promoted the work of a conservative "nutjob" eschewed by the Mormon church.
By David Corn and Stephanie Mencimer | Thu Oct. 11, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/04/us-usa-campaign-romney-idUSBRE8931RA20121004 ], lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the "blessings of slavery." Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University.
On May 30, 2009, George Wythe University (named after the first law professor in America, who was a teacher of Thomas Jefferson), held a fundraising gala at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Beck, who was then riding high as a Fox News host, was the special guest, tapped to receive the school's annual "Statesman Award." Romney introduced him.
In a video message—obtained by Mother Jones—that was recorded for the event, Romney praised Beck and this school, which the US Department of Justice has called a "diploma mill." He hailed George Wythe University and its supporters for "building statesmen" and "moving forward the cause of liberty and building men and women of virtue and wisdom, diplomacy, and courage." He introduced Beck as a "man who is really making an impact in our entire country today." Romney noted that Beck's "approach is refreshing" and that he "tries to focus his message on action…on learning the principles of freedom and liberty, on standing up and making your voice heard, on reading and applying the wisdom of our nation's founders to the challenges of today." Beck, he asserted, was "a statesman in his own right." Here's the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJKAp6eYN24 , as embedded]:
At the time of the fundraiser, Beck had established himself as a champion of the far right who peddled extreme and conspiratorial views. In the weeks prior to this event, he had declared [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/03/09/beck-claims-obama-is-so-clearly-a-socialist-hes/148115 ] that President Barack Obama was "clearly" a socialist who had "surrounded himself with Marxists his whole life," and Beck had told [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/04/07/beck-denies-responsibility-for-pittsburgh-shoot/148968 ] listeners of his radio show that Obama will "surely take away your gun or take away you ability to shoot a gun." Yet Beck was a towering figure on the right and a favorite of the emerging tea party movement. It was not odd that Romney, anticipating another presidential run, would seek to win his favor and proclaim him a "statesman." His endorsement of George Wythe (pronounced "with") University was more curious.
The school was founded in 1992 by Oliver DeMille, along with two other Skousen associates. DeMille is described in a 2007 university catalog as "a popular keynote speaker, writer, and business consultant" who earned a master's degree in "Christian Political Science" and a doctorate in religious education at the unaccredited and now-defunct Coral Ridge Baptist University. In 1992, DeMille published an over-the-top tract, The New World Order: Choosing Between Christ and Satan in the Last Days [ http://www.amazon.com/The-New-World-Order-Choosing/dp/B000KMMWBS ], in which he and his coauthor wrote:
The term "New World Order" means the same thing today—abolishment of Christianity and the adoption of Satan's plan—whether spoken in lodges and meetings of secret societies or on national television by George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. This does not mean that Bush or Gorbachev are Satan-worshippers, but they have accepted his plan—that governments should use force to make people live correctly.
The book also noted:
During the coming year the secret combinations and the governments they control will do a number of things to build a Satanic New World Order. President Bush and many Congressmen, who are controlled by the secret societies, will attempt to further this cause and to continue the curtailment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
DeMille's book endorsed an assortment of conservative conspiracy theories, including the notion that the "Establishment" was going to turn the United States into a socialist state, disarm the American military and put it under United Nations control, and merge the country with Mexico, Canada, and other Latin American countries. (According to an official history of GWU [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/460998-the-first-fifteen-years ], DeMille later considered the publication of this book a mistake.)
In the program [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/460995-glenn-beck-gala-program ] for the 2009 Beck-Romney fundraiser, DeMille's welcome message sounded the alarm: "The figurative redcoats are at our door as threats to our liberty, prosperity, and sovereignty are no longer ideological or symbolic, but very real and immediate." One way to preserve liberty, he noted, was to donate to George Wythe University.
The school was established in a hunting lodge in southern Utah purchased by William Doughty, a Skousen devotee who also wanted to create a self-sufficient alternative community for conservatives who believed that the Constitution was being dismantled by the US government. The initial plans called for a center devoted to Skousen and his writings and a constitutional theme park populated by Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry impersonators. Skousen and his family donated more than $100,000 and gave their blessing to Doughty's fundraising efforts.
In a 1962 book, Skousen denounced homosexuality and noted, "Every boy should know that masturbation may be the first step to homosexuality." In his 1970 book, The Naked Capitalist [ http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Capitalist-W-Cleon-Skousen/dp/0899683231 ], Skousen asserted that a sinister "secret society of the London-Wall Street axis"—which included the Council on Foreign Relations—controlled the world and manipulated global events, financing revolutions and aligning itself with "dictatorial forces" to preserve its power. In a 1970 article, Skousen, who was active with the John Birch Society, claimed that criticism of the Mormon church for prohibiting African Americans from its priesthood was nothing but a communist conspiracy against the church. (He also recorded [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/221780/romneys-radical-roots/mark-hemingway ] a spoken-word album for the John Birch Society on the dangers of LSD.) In The Five Thousand Year Leap[ http://www.amazon.com/5000-Year-Leap-Original-Authorized/dp/0880801484 ], a supposed history influenced by Mormon theology and published in 1981, Skousen contended that the Constitution is rooted in the bible. (Beck has heavily promoted the book to his listeners and viewers and wrote the introduction to a new edition.)
Still, until 2010, George Wythe University taught Skousen's work as part of its core curricula [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/460994-george-wythe-course-catalog-2007 ], alongside such classics as Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Tom Paine's Common Sense. Freshmen were assigned The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Making of America [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-America-Substance-Constitution/dp/0880800178 ], which came close to idealizing slavery, as in a passage in the book quoting a 1934 essay: "If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates." While promoting The Making of America, Skousen called for eliminating a host of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; for selling off national parks; for ending the direct election of US senators; and for weakening the separation of church and state.
George Wythe University has never been accredited, and for most of its history, its leadership has been comprised of people who earned their academic credentials from other unaccredited schools. (Andrew Groft, a recent president whose degrees came from George Wythe, was caught in a prostitution sting [ http://ironcountytoday.com/bookmark/10770428-Groft-enters-guilty-plea-for-solicitation- ] shortly after leaving the school.) For years, the school handed out generous "life experience" credits toward a Ph.D. in a host of different specialties. One of the school's most famous doctorate recipients is former Michigan congressman Mark Siljander. He served for a couple of years as a George Wythe trustee and earned a Ph.D. in international business from the school after writing a 10-page dissertation and attending no classes. In 2010, Siljander pleaded guilty to charges he had been an unregistered lobbyist for an Islamic charity with terrorist ties. In his sentencing memo [ http://www.motherjones.com/documents/460996-mark-siljander-sentencing-memo ], the Department of Justice labeled George Wythe University a "diploma mill."
Since its inception, the school has suffered financial difficulties. In recent years, it has been plagued with declining enrollment. Shortly before the Beck fundraiser, the university reported that its enrollment was half of what it had been the previous year, with only about 150 students. More recent money troubles have stemmed from ill-advised real estate deals in an effort to build a much larger campus. The high-profile endorsements from Beck and Romney did not do much to place the school on better footing. The gala itself, according to school officials, "failed to net any gains."
GWU has recently closed its doctorate program, and this spring announced that it was abandoning ambitious plans for the new campus. Its main building in Cedar City is for sale, and the school is now operating out of an office suite in Salt Lake City. Enrollment is down to a mere 60 students.
There are conflicting accounts as to how Romney came to endorse George Wythe. Shanon Brooks, a former GWU president and head of the committee that organized the 2009 gala, tells Mother Jones, "I believe that the video was secured via members of his family who had a connection with him." But Andrea Saul, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, says, "Glenn Beck asked Gov. Romney to introduce him, and the governor agreed to do it." By this telling, Romney, as he was eyeing his next presidential bid, endorsed a conspiracy-promoting school of iffy standing to score points with a conspiracy-minded conservative icon—and ended up making common cause with crackpot thinking shunned by the Mormon church and the National Review.
The Tea Party movement plainly has roots in earlier political trends, but it’s tough to pinpoint a seminal moment, a spark out of which this ideology of tribal rage took its modern form. By accident over the weekend I think I may have found it in the form of an obscure old speech.
Allow me to put off identifying the speaker or the circumstances. First, let me share a few excerpts. Recognize any familiar themes?
We sound a call for a return to constitutional government in America…
[We] stand beside the constitution of the United States with drawn sword. [We] are ready to stand, even at the expense of life itself, as Crocket, Bowie and Houston stood in Texas, for individual liberty and freedom, for the right of the people to govern themselves.
Hitler offered the people of Germany a shortcut to human progress. He gained power by advocating human rights for minority groups. Under his plan, the constitutional rights of the people were destroyed.
The proposed federal police state, directed from Washington, will force life in each hamlet in America to conform to a Washington pattern. Russia is ruled from Moscow. May God forbid that your state and my state, your country and my country, your city and my city, your farm and my farm, shall ever be subjected to Washington Bureaucratic police rule.
The proposal to take from you your right to deal with your local problems in a way that is satisfactory to you and to invest the right to deal with those problems in Washington is a way that is wholly unsatisfactory to you is so antagonistic to our form of government, and so contrary to everything that we have stood for since 1776 that it is obliged to be communistic in concept, un-American in principle, and undemocratic in execution.
Its [Justice Dept.] agents would circulate throughout the land, meddling with private business, policing elections, intervening in private lawsuits, breeding litigation and keeping our people in a constant state of apprehension of harassment…The people do not want the Federal government to usurp the police power, and thereby sow the seeds of a Gestapo in America.
…the federal government…is trying to trying to take their police power from the states. When this occurs, the last vestige of local control of the police and local exercise of the police power, so essential if we are to remain a free people, will have been destroyed.
…even at the sacrifice of the morale of the soldiers and the safety of the country itself, against the advice of the military leaders charged with the defense of the nation. Our boys in service should not be subjected to an unnecessary hazard. The American people do not want their sons placed in such a position, when the military leaders say it is unsafe, simply, to allow politicians of this country to appeal to bloc voters.
It is fundamental in this whole American system that, if liberty is to be retained in this country, the control of our elections must remain at home. There can be no tyrant, there can be no dictator, in America, if the people in the communities of the nation control their elections, fix voting qualifications, and say who can and who cannot vote.
The proposed American FEPC was patterned after a Russian law written by Joseph Stalin about 1920, referred to in Russia as Stalin’s “All-Races Law”… Stalin was commissar of Nationalities of the time that he wrote this law and he used it as a means of advancing himself to supreme dictator of Soviet Russia. The FEPC might as well be entitled a law to sabotage America.
These are excerpts from Strom Thurmond’s 1948 speech accepting the Presidential nomination of the States’ Rights Democrats [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat ] (the “Dixiecrats”) at their convention in Houston. What are the dangers that inspired the young Democratic Governor of South Carolina to break from his party and warn of a mortal threat to representative government?
The Democratic Party in the summer of 1948 had embraced platform planks [ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/1948-democratic-convention.html ] calling for anti-lynching laws, an end to the poll tax, desegregation of the military, and a law barring racial discrimination in hiring. Those were the proposals so intolerable to a free people that he compared them to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.
It is important to remember that Thurmond was an energetic supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. An activist Federal bureaucracy didn’t become a danger to liberty until it began to undermine white supremacy [ http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2012/07/is-obama-trying-to-enslave-you/ ].
Thurmond’s 1948 acceptance speech is no masterpiece, but it marks an important political watershed. In the speech, Thurmond is composing a new language through which Southern “racial conservatives” could communicate their complaints beyond the region.
He was pioneering the use of “Communism” as a proxy, building a new dog-whistle for racists. This language allowed the Dixiecrats to climb out of their sweaty Southern box and expand the Neo-Confederate campaign without stinking up the room with N-bombs [ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/Strom_Thurmond_1948_Speech_Clip.ogg ].
Sixty years before the Obama Administration, Strom Thurmond delivered what can perhaps be considered the very first Tea Party speech, so perfect in its carefully couched language that with only a few variations Glenn Beck could deliver it on the air today. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
***
I highly recommend reading the entire speech. It’s not transcribed online, but I obtained a scanned copy from the Thurmond Institute at Clemson and posted it here:
Taliban Peace Talks: Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, Hamid Karzai Advisor, Sees Progress
A US Army soldier attached to 2nd platoon, C troop, 1st Squadron (Airborne) ,91st U.S Cavalry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team operating under the NATO sponsored International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols near Baraki Barak base in Logar Province, on October 13, 2012. (MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP/GettyImages)
* Stanekzai badly hurt in blast last year that killed ex-president
* Optimistic that political settlement can be reached
By Adrian Croft Posted: 10/14/2012 5:55 pm EDT
KABUL, Oct 14 (Reuters) - The Afghan government's efforts to encourage Taliban insurgents to enter peace talks are making progress despite apparent deadlock, a senior government negotiator said on Sunday.
Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, who was wounded in a Taliban attack a year ago, suggested there was behind-the-scenes activity to start a peace process in Afghanistan.
"When politicians are on the stage, they will be always saying something different than what they are discussing in private," he said.
"There (is) progress," he said, without giving details.
Stanekzai was badly hurt in an explosion detonated by a Taliban suicide bomber in September last year that killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and head of the High Peace Council, set up by President Hamid Karzai to liaise with insurgents.
Stanekzai, who suffered injuries to his feet and a lung and lost his hearing on one side in the attack, has returned to work as a senior advisor to Karzai and head of the peace council's secretariat.
With most foreign combat troops due to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, a political settlement between the Afghan government and insurgents is widely seen as a way of bringing stability to the country.
Stanekzai said he was optimistic about the prospects for a political settlement but said it was hard to say whether one could be reached before the end of 2014.
"It is very difficult to set a timeline. Sometimes maybe a consensus can be reached when people are under the pressure of time ... that pressure sometimes brings people together," he said, speaking to a group of foreign reporters visiting Afghanistan on a media tour organised by NATO.
Talks on a political settlement have so far failed to make much headway, while the Taliban said in March they were suspending nascent peace talks with the United States, blaming "shaky, erratic and vague" U.S. statements.
Contacts between the Taliban and the Afghan government have continued, according to Afghan government sources.
Stanekzai also suggested there would be no need to hold separate talks from the Taliban with the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based group accused of high-profile attacks in Afghanistan, and designated a terrorist organisation by the United States last month. "They are counting themselves as a part of the Taliban," he said.
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