THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1981
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Highlights of This Page
Ronald Reagan takes office; American hostages released the same day. Reagan shot. Israel bombs Iraqi nuclear plant. Reagan fires 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Sandra Day O'Connor joins Supreme Court. Egypt's Anwar Sadat assassinated. Reagan authorizes covert, and illegal, support for Nicaragua's Contras. Budget director Stockman admits that supply-side economics are merely a front for redistributing wealth to the richest Americans. The Washington Times, a conservative paper owned by Sun Myung Moon, launches; Moon quickly becomes a critical ally of the GOP.
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- Many of the US's richest families are involved in oil. Heading the list are the Rockefellers (Standard Oil/Exxon) and the Mellons (Gulf). Just below are the Texas-California families: Getty, Hunt, Bass, and Cullen. The oil-holding Texans most closely connected to the Bush family -- Robert Mosbacher, William Farish, Hugh Liedtke, etc. -- are still immensely wealthy, but not in the top echelons of oil wealth. The Bush family itself has far more political strength than oil wealth. Upon his assumption of the vice presidency, George H.W. Bush will move to change that. His focus: deregulating the energy industry. Over the next two decades, Bush's success in deregulating the energy industry wins him enormous political and financial support among the oil and natural gas interests. (Kevin Phillips)
- Shortly before being appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy (ISP), Richard Perle is paid a consulting fee by an Israeli arms manufacturer, Soltam. Shortly after assuming his post, Perle writes a letter to the Secretary of the Army urging evaluation and purchase of artillery shells manufactured by Soltam. (Perle will accept a position at Soltam in 1987.) Stephen Bryen, a former Senate Foreign Relations committee staff member accused of providing classified information to Israel, becomes Deputy to Perle and receives top secret clearances. Paul Wolfowitz, as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hires neoconservative Michael Ledeen as a special advisor. In 1982, Perle hires Douglas Feith to be his Special Counsel; Feith later becomes Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. Michael Maloof also becomes an aide to Perle as a foreign affairs specialist. In 1983, Feith will be fired because he becomes the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Also, on the recommendation of Perle, Ledeen will be hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism, where his superior first became concerned that he was viewing classified material that he was not cleared to see. In 1984, Ledeen will leave his position in DoD and join the National Security Council (NSC) as a consultant. He will suggest to Oliver North, his new boss at NSC, "that Israeli contacts might be useful in obtaining release of the US hostages in Lebanon." In 1985, Ledeen's Israeli intelligence contacts are used to broker the Iran-Contra arms deals. He will with Iranian Manucher Ghorbanifar to set up the deal. Concerned over his relationship with Israel, NSC downgrades Ledeen's security clearance. In January 1986, North writes to John Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel. In 1988, Bryen will be shown to be a key figure behind the attempted export of "klystrons," small microwave amplifiers that are critical missile components, to Israel. Bryen will resign his post with DoD in late 1988 and work for several defense technology consulting firms. (Counterpunch/The Nation/Daily Kos)
- Records for George H.W. Bush's Zapata Oil from 1960-66 are "inadvertently destroyed." (Kevin Phillips)
- Arkansas realtor and land speculator Jim McDougal buys a bankrupt S&L in Augusta, Arkansas, and adds it to his tiny financial empire. (Susan McDougal)
- Fresh out of graduate school, Condoleezza Rice lands a plum fellowship at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control. The Center had never before awarded a fellowship to a woman; almost immediately, Rice lands an assistant professorship with Stanford. Though undoubtely qualified, Rice herself admits that she was largely an affirmative-action hire: "They didn't need another Soviet specialist," she told an interviewer from Vogue. "But they asked themselves, 'How often does a black female who could diversify our ranks come along?'" Rice, until recently a Democrat, claims that she cast her first Republican vote, for Ronald Reagan, in 1980; her fellow faculty members remember her as being a vocal Republican among a faculty dominated by Democrats. However, in 1984 Rice will work as a foreign-policy advisor for the presidential campaign of Democrat Gary Hart, casting doubt on her later claims of being a Reagan supporter. (Laura Flanders)
- Evangelical Christian and political strategist Gary North says the task of conservative evangelicals is to "infiltrate" the government: "Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order." Such duplicity is necessary, according to Reconstructionist guru R.J. Rushdoony, who uses the Biblical story of Rahab to say that Christians need not be truthful "in acts of war. Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics." (Rahab was a Canaanite harlot who hid two Israelite spies, and in so doing helped the Israelites sack Jericho and bring down the kingdom of Canaan.) And since Christianity, according to Rushdoony and his far-right followers, is in a constant state of war with other faiths, lying is always an acceptable ruse for Christians who run for office but conceal their extremist beliefs. In 1993, Virginia's Michael Farris, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, will defend Oliver North's criminal actions during Iran-Contra by saying, "What Ollie North did was basically the moral equivalent of what the spies and Rahab did in Jericho. Rahab lied to protect lives." Fellow extremists Paul Weyrich and Sun Myung Moon have advocated the same practice of lying your way into office in order to effect change. "Lying for the cause is not a sin," says Weyrich; Moon, who has declared himself the son of God and the successor to Jesus Christ, calls such lies "God's work." Former right-wing journalist David Brock writes that he watched those practices being followed on a daily basis by anti-Clinton zealots, including lawyers and jurists, as they lied "baldy and incessantly" in their crusade against the president, whom, of course, they excoriated for being a liar himself. (Mark Crispin Miller)
January 1981
Ronald Reagan takes office; American hostages released the same day
- January 20: Reagan takes office, winning the November election in part due to Carter's inability to bring the hostages home. Iran releases the hostages the same day Reagan takes office, giving credence to the belief that Republicans secretly negotiated with the Khomeini regime to keep the hostages until after the US elections. These allegations are evidenced during the Iran-Contra hearings later in the decade. Shortly after the inauguration, arms shipments to Iran resume from the US and Israel; Nicaraguan harbors are later mined as part of the effort to support the Contras.
- Emboldened by Reagan's rout of Carter, Republican Congressmen, who have endured almost a quarter-century of Democratic majority rule and grown accustomed to being a permanent minority, now plan on retaking Congress. Many of them coalesce around radical rightist Newt Gingrich, in part because they feel their own leaders have been far too accomodating of the Democrats. Dick Cheney, the ambitious, well-connected Congressman from Wyoming, keeps in contact with Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) through his aide David Gribben, though Cheney himself does not yet want to publicly associate himself with Gingrich and accept the commensurate risks.
- Gingrich's COS members take advantage of the government-sponsored C-SPAN's decision to televise House proceedings as long as a member is speaking -- as a result, COS members routinely deliver fire-eating attacks on Democrats during late-night sessions when few or no other members are present, often garnering headlines, and providing red-meat videotapes for whipping up support among voters and other Republican lawmakers. When the COS tactics begin bearing fruit, Cheney beings the COS duscissions into his House Policy Committee meetings, effectively expanding Gingrich's reach from the half-dozen COS backbenchers to the 30 far more influential members of the HPC. But Cheney, ever the savvy bureaucrat, stays close to moderate House Minority Leader Robert Michel, whom Gingrich derides as too eager to accept the "crumbs the Democrats left on the table." (Bushwatch, Decades History Timeline, Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
- Because of Vice President George Bush's CIA experience and because of the influence of chief of staff James Baker, President Reagan will issue National Security Directive 3, naming Bush to head a Special Situation Group mandated to identify new security threats to the nation and planning ways to counter them. Historian Kevin Phillips writes, "A new era of clandestine arms sales, massive armaments buildups, secret diplomacy, and covert actions, perhaps as much Bush's doings as Reagan's, was about to unfold in the Middle East generally and in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan specifically. With it, the seeds of two Persian Gulf wars and hundreds of terrorist strikes would be fertilized and watered." (Kevin Phillips)
- One of Reagan's first acts as president is to lift US sanctions against the regime of Augusto Pinochet of Chile. The Carter administration had imposed sanctions in 1979 in retaliation for Pinochet's refusal to cooperate with American prosecutors of a lethal terrorist bombing in Washington, DC, in 1976 that resulted in the deaths of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American associate Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Three Chilean officials are known to have helped plan and carry out the attack; Pinochet has steadfastly refused to extradite them to US soil. The State Department found that the Pinochet regime had "in effect condoned an act of international terrorism" in the streets of the US capital. By lifting the sanctions, Reagan joins in condoning terrorist acts. (Joe Conason)
- Within months of taking office, Reagan will implement what he and his administration calls a "new" paradigm of economic policy, nicknamed "supply-side economics." Dressed up as a fairer way to tax the American people, in reality it is nothing more than the long-discredited "trickle-down economics" advocated for years by the wealthiest of the wealthy. Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, will later admit that "Reaganomics" was never more than a shell game designed to drive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and shift the tax burden away from the corporations and the wealthiest families and onto the backs of the middle-class and poor. Instead of the equalization of the tax burden and the reducing of the federal deficit, as promised by the administration, Reaganomics will drive the tax burden onto the lower end of the income brackets in an unprecedented fashion, and will give the US economy the biggest federal deficits in history. It is the public's reaction to twelve years of Reagan-Bush economic policies that will drive Republicans out of the Oval Office in 1992. (Joe Conason)
- Reagan names Anne Gorsuch Burford to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch Burford, a veteran of Secretary of the Interior James Watt's Mountain States Legal Fund, is a staunch advocate of privatization of wilderness and allowing developers and corporations to operate in America's wilderness areas as they see fit. Gorsuch Burford will find herself in hot water when it becomes known that she will encourage a Southwestern gas refiner to break EPA's unleaded-gas regulations. She refuses to turn over EPA Superfund enforcement documents to the House Energy Committee, using the White House's recommendation of "executive privilege," and shreds the documents instead of turning them over. Her husband, Bob Burford, another MSLF alumnus who becomes the head of the Bureau of Land Management, allegedly gives huge concessions to ranching and mining lobbies. Both will resign under a cloud, and Watt will be "run out of town," according to journalist David Helvarg, "with a stake driven through his heart by a very image-conscious Nancy Reagan," who is angered by the horrified public reaction over Watt's incredibly insensitive comments about the minorities on his staff. Gorsuch Burford herself will begin the process of divorcing her husband, but will die of cancer in 2004 before the divorce is final. (Wikipedia, Laura Flanders)
February 1981
- February: Reagan's newly posted Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, a former industry lobbyist, testifies before Congress: "That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have: to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations." Author Austin Miles interprets Watt's statement to read, "We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand." In May 1981, Watt will say, "My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns." (Wikipedia)
March 1981
Reagan shot
- March 30: Would-be assassin John Hinckley attempts to kill Reagan, firing at him and his party outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. Reagan and press secretary James Brady are severely wounded, along with Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and a Washington policeman, Thomas Delahanty. (Hinckley is obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, and after stalking her for years, determined that an assassination of a president would make her notice him. Hinckley originally planned on shooting Jimmy Carter, but was prevented by a timely arrest on firearms charges. He will be found not guilty by reason of insanity and incarcerated in a Washington, DC hospital.) Reagan is far more gravely injured than is reported, and for months is unable to perform the duties of his office, leaving Vice President George H.W. Bush and others, including Secretary of State Alexander Haig, to lead the government. In a strange coincidence, Hinckley's brother Scott was scheduled to dine with Bush's son Neil that evening; the Bush and Hinckley families have a long and close association. Neil Bush, younger son of George H.W. Bush, lives in Denver, as does Scott Hinckley, whose father owns Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. Scott is an executive vice-president in his father's firm. Neil Bush lived in Lubbock, Texas until 1978; John Hinckley lived their from 1974-1980. Both Neil and George W. Bush deny ever meeting John Hinckley, though the Bush and Hinckley families have been close for years. The Hinckleys have donated large amounts of money to the Bush family's political coffers over the years. (Awesome 80s, Buzzflash, AP/Free Republic, Nationmaster)
April 1981
- April: On a trip to the Middle East, Secretary of State Alexander Haig is told by both Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Saudi Arabia's Prince Fahd that Iran is receiving spares for their US-originated equipment from Israel.
June 1981
Israel bombs Iraqi nuclear plant
- June 7: Israel bombs the Osirak nuclear power plant near Baghdad. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin claims that the plant is about to go into operation, producing material usable for nuclear weapons; this claim is debunked, but many believe that Iraq wants to begin producing nuclear weapons. Much of the world condemns Israel for the attack, but Reagan says, "Israel might have sincerely believed it was a defensive move," and "It is difficult for me to envision Israel as being a threat to its neighbors." The US joins the UN Security Council in "strongly condemning" Israel, but lets it be known that it will veto any attempt to impose sanctions on Israel. Deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman realized that Israel must have used CIA-provided satellite photos to conduct the attack, and decides to limit Israel's access to photographs covering areas no farther than 250 miles from Israel's border, reducing Israel's satellite intelligence to its immediate neighbors. Inman made many enemies both at home and abroad with this decision, and 13 years later, when Bill Clinton nominates him for Secretary of Defense, he was attacked so ferociously by Israel supporters within the government and the media that Inman declines the nomination. Vice-President George H.W. Bush publicly and privately deplores the strike. In June, Vice-President Bush calls his college buddy William Draper, the chairman of the Export-Import Bank, and successfully urges the Ex-Im to loan Iraq $484 million for an oil pipeline to be constructed by Bechtel. (Secretary of State George Shultz was Bechtel's president before taking over at the State Department.) (MidEast Web, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, BBC, New American)
July 1981
- July: An Argentinian plane chartered by Israel crashes in Soviet territory. It is found to have delivered three shipments of illegal US military supplies to Iran. Alexander Haig later says, "I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in the White House winked." This is the first time the State Department learns of the Reagan administration's secret policy. Nicholas Veliotes, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, will later investigate the case and learns from "people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. ...I believe it was the initiative of a few people [who] gave the Israelis the go-ahead. The net result was a violation of American law." (Bushwatch, Consortium News)
August 1981
Reagan fires 11,000 striking air traffic controllers
- August 3: After 7 months of negotiations, almost 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walk off the job, hoping that a strike will persuade the government to give in to its demands for higher wages, a shorter work week, and better retirement benefits. According to an article by Elizabeth Schulte, "Air traffic control is one of the most stressful jobs there is. Hundreds of airline passengers' lives hang in the balance with every decision a controller makes. As a result, ulcers, heart conditions, hypertension and alcoholism are common among controllers. PATCO's main demand centered on safer working conditions, including a 32-hour workweek, updated computer equipment and retirement after 20 years of service. Unlike every other country in the world, U.S. controllers were the only ones forced to work 40-hour weeks. On top of that, they worked eight-hour shifts without breaks. And often, up to 20 hours of mandatory overtime was added on each week. For all of these reasons, some 89 percent left before retirement age. About 40 percent of these left to collect disability retirement. The federal government got a lot of mileage out of attacking PATCO's demand for a $10,000 wage increase. But in fact, the salary for a starting controller was just $15,000 a year. It took seven years and just the right transfer opportunities for a worker to get to $29,000 a year." Instead, Ronald Reagan gets involved, warning the workers to go back to their jobs within 48 hours or face termination. (The air traffic controllers are federal employees with no-strike clauses in their contracts.) PATCO felt that, in the light of 22 similar strikes by "no-strike" federal employees without repercussions, that they would probably be secure. The strikes threaten major carriers like Braniff, Eastern, American, and TWA, who report losses of $30 million per day during the strikes, along with other businesses.
- The FAA's contingency plan works relatively well to minimize the strike's effects, bringing aroung 80% of airline flights back on schedule largely through "scabbing" non-union workers. Reagan follows through with his threat to fire the strikers. The public, stroked by the mainstream media, demonizes the striking controllers, though AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland accuses Reagan of "brutal overkill" in firing the strikers, and other union leaders accuse Reagan of "union-busting," but Kirkland and others discourage any sympathy strikes by fellow unions, partially because PATCO was one of the few unions to support Reagan's candidacy. PATCO leaders are jailed for ignoring court injunctions against the strikes, while judges levy fines up to $1 million a day against the unions and the Justice Department prepares indictments against 75 controllers. 11,000 striking workers are ultimately fired, and 1,200 go back to work. In October the Federal Labor Relations Authority will decertify PATCO. Two months after the strike, a congressional committee report indicates that by January 1983 only two-thirds of the controllers needed for full and safe operation of air traffic would be in place, and recommends rehiring some of the strikers who had been fired. The administration refuses, and Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis refuses even to meet with PATCO leader Robert Poli. By 1984 air traffic had increased by 6 percent while there were still 20 percent fewer controllers than had been on the job prior to the strike.
- According to journalist Haynes Johnson, the decisive manner in which Reagan handled the PATCO strike convinces many Americans that he was "the kind of leader the country longed for and thought it had lost: a strong president," in sharp contrast to the widely-held view that Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had been too indecisive. Reagan stresses that he derived no satisfaction from sacking the controllers: "I supported unions and the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively," he later writes in his memoirs, "but no president could tolerate an illegal strike by Federal employees." Reagan is apparently unwilling to stand behind the letter he wrote Poli in October 1980, which said in part, "You can rest assured that if I am elected President, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.... I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers." Schulte writes that the Reagan administration will go overboard in attacking the PATCO strikers: "The Reagan administration used everything in its arsenal to teach PATCO -- and every other union -- a lesson. Militants were arrested, jailed and fined. Some PATCO members with federal mortgages lost their homes. Others were denied when they tried to adopt children." The real point is to destabilize and cow other unions. "[N]ot since the infamous 1892 Homestead strike undermined unionism in the emerging mass production industries has any single defeat cast such a long historical shadow over organized labor," writes history professor Joseph McCartin. "In some ways, the unions have yet to recover from the PATCO strike. ...It is no coincidence that as the labor movement's strength has declined, social inequality has advanced." One striker says in recollection, "Given the same set of circumstances at any given time, I would do it again. There is no doubt that history will prove PATCO was right in their actions. Maybe legally wrong, but surely morally right." (Eighties Club, Socialist Worker, History News Network)
- August 19: After years of dispute over Libya's claim to sovreignity over the Gulf of Sidra, and a number of encounters between Libyan Air Force planes and US naval aircraft, two Su-22 fighter-bombers are intercepted by two F-14 Tomcat fighters from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. While trying to escort the Libyans out of the exercise area, one of the American planes is fired upon by one of the Libyan craft. The F-14s evade the air-to-air missile and shoot down both Su-22s. Both Libyan pilots survive the destruction of their planes. (Global Security)
September 1981
Sandra Day O'Connor joins Supreme Court
- September 25: Sandra Day O'Connor is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. O'Connor made her name as a diligent Republican operative in Arizona, was twice elected to the Arizona state senate, and in 1968 co-chaired the state committee to elect Richard Nixon. After serving on the Arizona appellate court, Nixon, who had promised to name a woman to the bench, chose O'Connor, and she is named to the court with little difficulty. She is an avowed federalist, and though considered a conservative when named, due to the steady movement of the Court to the right, is now considered a centrist. O'Connor will often be the "swing" vote in many decisions, sometimes leftwards, sometimes right. In 2000, presidential candidate Al Gore will hope that O'Connor will provide the fifth vote to allow the Florida recounts to proceed, a hope that O'Connor will not fulfill. She will announce her retirement from the Court in July 2005. Conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell said after Reagan announced her nomination, "Every good Christian should oppose the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court," to which O'Connor's fellow Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater retorted, "Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's *ss." (Wikipedia, Vincent Bugliosi)
October 1981
Egypt's Anwar Sadat assassinated
- October 6: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated. Hosni Mubarak assumes power. Mubarak will continue Sadat's policy of distancing Egypt from overt support for the Palestinian resistance and the PLO. (Anwar Sadat Biography, Dawoud el-Alami)
November 1981
- November: Lynne Cheney, wife of Wyoming GOP representative Dick Cheney, publishes a potboiler historical romance of lesbian love titled Sisters. The book also promotes contraception. Shortly thereafter, she will publicly embrace the anti-feminist ideology of her husband and the Reagan-Bush conservatives. (Laura Flanders)
Winter 1981
- Winter: Financial records from Zapata Oil from 1960-66 are found to be "inadvertently destroyed." (Bushwatch)
December 1981
Reagan authorizes covert, and illegal, support for Nicaragua's Contras
- December: Reagan signs an executive order that authorizes a covert operation by the CIA to support the contras, rebels who are fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua, popularly called the Sandinistas, who replaced the despotic, but US-friendly, regime of Anastasio Somoza. The administration hopes its secret backing will bolster the contras' appearance as an indigenous independent force, although the contras are largely Nicaraguan exiles and former businessmen who profited handsomely under Somoza and have little citizen support. (Iran-Contra Timeline)
Budget director Stockman admits that supply-side economics are merely a front for redistributing wealth to the richest Americans
- December: In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly, budget director David Stockman admits that the Reagan "supply-side" economic policies are "a Trojan Horse to bring down the top [income tax] rate." Stockman explains that the term "trickle-down economics," widely avoided in favor of the more benign "supply-side economics," means that the government gives the vast majority of the tax-cut benefits to the wealthy, and in theory those benefits will "trickle down" to everyone else, a phenomenon that, predictably, never happens. "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,'" says Stockman, "so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.'" This economic policy will be revived in 2001 by George W. Bush, who tells the American people, "Those in the greatest need should receive the greatest help;" unfortunately, in judging the impact of Bush's tax cuts, it is apparent that those Bush feels are in the greatest need are those making in excess of $373,000, as they are the ones to receive "the greatest help" from his tax policies. (Atlantic Monthly/Paul Waldman)
- December 13: Polish dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski cracks down on the Solidarity federation of Polish trade unions. Jaruzelski suspends the union, declares martial law, and imprisons many of Solidarity's leaders, including Lech Walesa. In October 1982, Jaruzelski will formally ban Solidarity's existence, though the trade union will continue an underground existence, bolstered by support from the Roman Catholic Church and the CIA. Martial law will be lifted in July 1983, though many of the civil liberties restraints will remain in place. (Wikipedia)
Late 1981
The Washington Times, a conservative paper owned by Sun Myung Moon, launches; Moon quickly becomes a critical ally of the GOP
- Late 1981: The Washington Star goes out of business, and is bought out by Sun Myung Moon's media empire, who relaunches the newspaper as the Washington Times in early 1982; Moon declares he purchased the newspaper "in response to Heaven's direction." Moon is a well-known media mogul and religious figure, head of the South Korea-based Unification Church, whose stated goal is to unify the world under his own theocratic rule. (In 2002, Moon will claim that, at a heavenly meeting attended by Muhammed, Jesus Christ, Confucius, and Buddha, and under the aegis of God himself, Jesus proclaims Moon as the Messiah, and all in attendance agree.) While he stands in opposition to Christianity, his virulent anti-Communism leads right-wing American politicians and operatives to join him in producing his newspaper, which rapidly becomes a powerful organ for promulgating right-wing viewpoints. Editors Arnaud de Borchgrave and Wesley Pruden, among others, see to it that the newspaper produces articles as well as opinion pieces that are heavily slanted to the right. (David Brock, Paul Waldman)
