Trump Staff in Secret Conservative Group

[DonViejo]

The Southern Poverty Law Center acquired a membership directory for the Council of National Policy, an ultra-secret conservative group, and Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and his campaign CEO Steve Bannon were listed as members. The directory is for 2014 and indicates that Conway was a member of the executive committee that year and Bannon was listed as a regular member. Neither official responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.

The secretive organization was described as wanting to be the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations and it is home to a number of individuals with fringe beliefs, including World Net Daily writer Jerome Corsi, a popular figure in the Obama “birther” movement.

“I don’t know if they are still involved or not,” Corsi said of Conway and Bannon in a phone interview with The Daily Beast. “I don’t really know either one. I think I’ve spoken to Steve Bannon a couple times on the phone. I don’t think I’ve ever even met Kellyanne.” Joseph Farah, the founder of WND, is also a member. He did not respond to questions about Bannon and Conway via email. Matthew Staver, the leader of Liberty Counsel who compared marriage equality to forced sterilization, is also part of the organization.

Interestingly enough, as The Daily Beast previously reported, the Council for National Policy endorsed Ted Cruz in the Republican primary and one of its loose affiliates, Conservatives of Faith was sought out for a March meeting to devise a plan to dump Trump.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/08/31/trump-staff-in-secret-conservative-group.html?via=desktop&source=copyurl

[Gothmog]

1. This ties into Rachel Maddow's opening segment

Secret societies spring up when the two party system is not functioning

[Demsrule86]

3. The Democratic Party is functioning just fine...

Such groups spring up when their racist bigot message could get them in trouble. I am so tired of these sort of hit and run attacks on the Democratic Party.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Not just 'conservatives' - white supremacists and anti-gay activists

From the SPLC article:

The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.

They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/08/31/revealed-conway-bannon-members-secretive-group