Reply #6: "Defunding the left" has been a goal for 30 years

[starroute]

Thr phrase goes back to at least 1981, when the Heritage Foundation published a set of recommendations for the Reagan administration that included "defunding the left" by depriving liberal organizations of federal funding. In 1984, the Capital Research Center was founded by a former Heritage Foundation vice president to dig out dirt on the finances of progressive groups. A lot of the attacks on ACORN, as well as the raw materials of Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories, come from the CRC's research.

I have a saved file summarizing the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference (no longer on line) which includes a paragraph saying, "Next, a panel on 'Defunding the Left,' moderated by the Leadership Institute’s Morton Blackwell, focused on big labor, and how government policies and funds enrich this 'engine of the far left,' as Stefan Gleason of the National Right to Work Foundation called it."

You've just got to know that if Morton Blackwell is part of it, it's got to be dirty.

And I have an article (also not online) which appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1995 that starts out with a correction:

The first name of Ed Gillespie, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, was omitted from a story yesterday on congressional Republicans' plans to trim the budgets of some government-funded nonprofit groups. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services.

Led by Virginia Lamp Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, a special group of senior House Republican experts and staff members has been quietly working under the auspices of House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services.

Yeah, that Ed Gillespie and that Virginia Thomas. Funny how the same names and agendas keep coming round, isn't it?

The article goes on to explain that "The effort, referred to by conservatives as 'defunding the left,' is intended to take aim at what they consider advocacy groups that lobby for liberal social programs from which they receive grants and contracts."

And it notes that "Thomas is a former Labor Department lawyer under the Republicans and lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who last year earned $78,800 as a senior policy coordinator for the House Republican Conference. She joined Armey's staff on Jan. 4 as his $108,234 chief liaison for all House committees. She declined to return telephone calls, and sources said she is sensitive about her position and reluctant to be seen as a leader in Armey's defunding effort. Her involvement in the defunding effort has raised sharp questions among liberals who recall that some of the targeted groups -- labor unions, legal advocates and the National Organization for Women -- were involved in the bitter battle to defeat her husband's nomination."

It really isn't a vast right-wing conspiracy, you know. It's a very tiny right-wing conspiracy consisting of about a dozen people whose names keep coming round over and over.