ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom), created decades ago, is a collection of attorneys organized to work cases that roll back civil rights. It is fundamentalists’ ‘answer’ to the ACLU.
Here is a sampling of extremist efforts that ADF supports or advocates.
The ADF also appears to be partnered with ‘Parents Rights in Education,’ which is a group that is using school mask mandates as a springboard to try to convince parents to pull their children out of the public school system.
To learn more about these fundamentalist dark money groups and how they overlap and interoperate with each other - including the CNP, ALEC, and Heritage - highly recommend reading Shadow Network, by Anne Nelson.
Not only has AT&T been propping up OAN, it appears they have been overpaying them as well.
And, despite everything that has happened and OAN’s clear contributions to the insurrection and pandemic disinfo, AT&T also appears to have renewed their contract again earlier this year.
Vitaly Korchevsky became a born-again evangelical in the Soviet Union in 1981, moved to the U.S. in 1989, and became pastor of a Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church in the Philadelphia suburbs.
The families that run Bethany Slavic Baptist Church in Sacramento operated an organized criminal real estate fraud scheme, contributing to the 2008 market crash.
One of its pastors, Adam Bondaruk, headed the Union of Pentecostal Christians of America.
From anti-abortion radicals, to anti-immigrant hate groups, the CNP unites the most extreme elements of the right wing universe with major funders and members of the Republican Party.
Its members played a key role in the Jan 6th plot to overthrow the election.
Over the last 40 years, CNP and its sister groups - ALEC and Heritage - have become a part of the Republican Party, driving (& radicalizing) voters to keep them in office.
They wrote the GOP’s voter suppression bills and tried to overthrow the election.
I feel like I should add that Liz Cheney voted against the Equality Act like 7 months ago. She voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and she voted to acquit Trump.
This thread outlines part of the reason that I simply don’t believe the GOP can be “saved.” The institution itself has been captured and infiltrated. There is no one who can stand up to it, even if they wanted to.
This is why we have to undo the party’s structural advantages.
-Outlaw the dark money that is anonymously funding it
-Ban partisan gerrymandering
-Counter GOP state laws enshrining their power/control
-Expand SCOTUS & expose its corruption
-Outreach to middle of the road voters, to explain what is going on
Most of these things are already addressed in Dem legislation - like the For the People Act.
But Dem “moderates” are slow walking these initiatives, and blocking us from using tools like filibuster reform that would allow us to implement them.