Yves here. Since this post contains some graphic details about parasites, you might not want to read it before a meal. Nevertheless, it describes an effective and therefore widely-used method for bending institutions to the will of outside parties. But there is a chicken and egg problem: did this mission-corruption success lead the shift in messaging and cultural values against bona fide progressivism, or did it first take shifting cultural norms first to give leverage over institutions, which then became force multipliers?
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
The parasital spider wasp. The female lays eggs on paralyzed spiders. When they hatch, the spider is food. (Source)
“A single egg is laid on the abdomen of the spider. … The egg hatches and the larva feeds on the spider. As the larva feeds on its host, it saves the vital organs, such as the heart and central nervous system, for last. By waiting until the final larval instar, it ensures the spider will not decompose before the larva has fully developed.”
—Wikipedia on the spider wasp
The seed for this piece is an article published at Juan Cole’s site, Informed Comment, and written by Ted Swedenburg. But the trees made from that seed are everywhere.
Subverting Academia
The article’s title is “Setting the Record Straight: Weaponizing Antisemitism to Cancel Academic Free Speech”. It starts:
As someone who believes deeply in human rights for all, who has spent a great deal of time in Palestine and Israel and cares a great deal about the people there, and who is very concerned and grieved about the loss of life in Israel on Oct. 7 and the subsequent massive deaths since that date in Gaza, I was very excited about the opportunity to participate in a forum on the Gaza conflict, sponsored by the University of Arkansas Honors College, that was to be held on Nov. 8.
Unfortunately, the event was canceled after charges of antisemitism were leveled against me and the other scheduled speaker, Professor Joel Gordon. Subsequently, due to the atmosphere created by such claims, not a single public event dealing with the Gaza Strip violence took place at the state’s flagship university in fall semester 2023.
On one level, this is about the all-too-common assaults on critics of Israeli genocide disguised as protection of liberal values and minority rights. There have been many such assaults.
But consider this:
The charge against us was made by Jay Greene, a former University of Arkansas professor now at the Heritage Foundation, with Fayetteville-based Conduit News. Greene’s accusations played a major role in the decision to cancel the event.
And this:
Investigative journalist James Bamford describes in The Nation the efforts of one of the most important organizations involved in this campaign, the well-funded Canary Mission. This organization, Bamford shows, is “a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them — charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability.”
So broadly, this is an op (I’m deliberately using NatSec State language) run by and through the Heritage Foundation and the Israeli-funded and directed Canary Mission.
These organizations act like parasites. Their host in this case is the University itself, whose political discourse they invade. What they kill are those parts of the university community friendly to the University’s mission but enemies of their own — protection of Israel at all costs.
Subverting the Southern Baptists
I’m not writing this to just trash the Right, though the Institutional Right is eminently trashable. I’m writing this to show how subversive operations like this work. Because there are many of them. And the rich, as you’ll see, on both sides use these tactics.
“Christian Leader Ralph Reed” (source)
George W. Bush and Karl Rove engineered an institutional takeover of faith communities. Note the roles of Ralph Reed, head of the unironically named Christian Coalition, and Richard Land in the passage below (emphasis added):
In 1997, Rove approached Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed with a deal that would make them the closest of political colleagues. “Ralph was very, very close to Rove,” recalls then-director of the Coalition, Marshall Wittman. “Ralph asked me in 1997 if I wanted to work on the [2000] Bush campaign. Rove was operating everything. … Rove engineered a $380,000 contract for Reed at Enron, the heart of the oil-centered corporate engine driving the Bush campaign, through longtime Bush family friend Kenneth Lay. …
Reed understood that conservative Christians were largely moral absolutists — either you were with them or you were their mortal enemy. No middle ground. … This mindset worked perfectly for Rove, who himself is a confessed agnostic with no real religious faith, but [it] can and does manipulate Christian conservatives as part of his scorched-earth political strategizing.
But Reed understood that the actual divide that could be so effectively exploited was not just between the faithful and the “godless,” but within denominations and church hierarchies. The idea of Protestants vs. Catholics, Baptists vs. humanists, was superficial, Reed believed. The more fundamental divide, as exploited by Reed, Rove, and their operatives, was within religious America. Richard Land, a Christian scholar who began working in the Rove political machine in the 1980s, explains, “It depends on which side of this sort of great divide in American life you’re on.”
Richard Land was president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1988 to 2013. Land, through the ERLC, controlled the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was simultaneously part of the Rove machine.
The host in this case is the Southern Baptist Convention, the governing body of the “world’s largest Baptist denomination, … the largest Protestant and second-largest Christian denomination in the United States.” The parasite was the Rove machine. Ralph Reed and Richard Land, among others, were the eggs.
The machine subverted the organization’s mission from religious to political. The goal was to give power to men like George W. Bush.
Subverting Liberal Churches
One more example, so you can see the process. If you’re old enough to have seen the 1960s battles for civil rights and all those other freedoms (sexual, feminist, and so on), you remember the great religious leaders that movement produced and attracted.
Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was a Baptist minister (a reason for the subversion described above) and the first President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
The brothers Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, and Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, were strong pro-Movement activists and often jailed.
As Frederick Clarkson writes of the Movement’s Protestant contingents:
For much of the 20th century, the mainline Protestant churches maintained a vigorous “social witness.” That is what these Protestants call their views on such matters as peace, civil rights and environmental justice. While there was certainly conservative opposition to the development of these views, and to the activities that grew out of them, the direction of mainline Protestantism was clear. The churches became powerful proponents of social change in the United States. They stood at the moral and political center of society with historic roots in the earliest days of the nation. Indeed, they epitomize the very idea and image of “church” for many Americans.
These mainline churches have been and are being subverted by institutions (predators) designed to subvert them from within:
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that powerful external interests would organize and finance the conservative rump factions into strategic formations intended to divide and conquer—and diminish the capacity of churches to carry forward their idea of a just society in the United States—and the world.
When the strategic funders of the Right, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, got together to create the institutional infrastructure of the Right in the 1970s and 80s, they underwrote the founding of the IRD [Institute on Religion and Democracy] in 1980 as a Washington, DC-based agency that would help network, organize, and inform internal opposition groups, while sustaining outside pressure and public relations campaigns.
The goal of the IRD is clear: to infiltrate, to neutralize, to control. The process, if you’re interested, is called “Steeplejacking.” For a book on this subject, the publisher says this (emphasis added):
An insider account by two ministers on the front lines of mainstream religion’s longtime shadow war against the religious right, Steeplejacking reveals how conservative renewal groups, backed by a right-wing organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy [IRD], use social wedge issues like homosexuality to infiltrate mainline churches and stir up dissent among members of the congregation, with the goal of taking over the leadership of the church, and ultimately, the denomination. The book unmasks the covert methods that renewal groups and the IRD use to spread their propaganda[.]
Predators and Prey
What’s common in all of these examples, is the takeover of institutions by a disciplined, well-funded outside group, with the goal of subverting its power for non-institutional purposes.
The spider wasp lays eggs in spiders and uses them as host and food for its larvae. These groups do the same. The connection to religion is purely coincidental, as the first example shows.
beginning in the late 90’s, i witnessed 2 simultaneous steeplejacking ops out here first hand.
i was an accidental observer…and not a christian…but given the tiny, interconnected population in this place, it was easy to watch it happen from outside the several churches.
remarkable that those within them couldnt see.
Believers believe.
What did it look like?
In the case of the Midwestern Catholic church I grew up in, the homilies went from a “no divorce” focus to a “no abortion” focus in less than a year during the Carter administration (not immediately post-Roe-v-Wade). That’s so fast that 9 and 10 year olds in the school, of which I was one, discussed how strange it was, and as adults it still comes up in conversation when we have reunions.
I’m sure there are better examples, but that’s my experience as a kid.
I think that Neuberger romanticizes the U.S. churches. They weren’t all that hard to subvert.
Certain denominations do have a history of advocacy of social change. But then, I am reminded that the Methodists oh-so-helpfully were proponents of Prohibition. That ought to be a lesson about making bad political decisions, if one is willing to listen.
Other U.S. Protestant denominations as agents of change? Well, yes, the Quakers, a tiny slice of U.S. Protestantism. Maybe the Congregationalists / Disciples of Christ plus the Unitarians.
Then the largest denomination: Catholicism. The tragedy of Catholicism in the U S of A is that it came out of two puritanical immigrant churches, the Irish and the Polish, both of which were touchy about legitimacy. The U.S. Catholic hierarch has been only too happy to sacrifice charity for the sake of keeping up with the Episcopalians and exerting rather rough control over the flock. Ergo: The U.S. Catholic hierarchy is now all aghast over that commie, Pope Francis.
The evolution of Catholicism, in particular Irish/Italian Catholicism in the US is quite interesting – originally it was set up very much in opposition to the dominance of Episcopalianism in the early to mid 19th Century in power structures. Irish bishops were very active in pushing for public schooling specifically to break the unofficial hold of Episcopalians over schooling in New York and Boston. In many ways, the Irish Church was an important bulwark against the establishment hold over key institutions. But its very noticeable that over the past few decades the non-Hispanic catholic church in the US has become very conservative, even in relation to Rome.
When Jeb Bush and a host of other GOP types converted, it was over. Like assuming Saturnalia, the RCC just assumes the old power structures especially as the North American RCC structures were built up. The abuse scandal obviously meant they were going to preach to a smaller choir. I think you can see a doubling down on the “traditional” aspects to bring in people who see mainline protestanism as dying and aren’t up for charismatic churches.
With more tolerance in society, many of the people who have reined in the church simply aren’t going to become priests and nuns. The priest shortage is real, so they have been bringing in foreign priests to keep churches open. A would be Father Drinan won’t have fellow like minded priests to even talk to. Then they are
In the 00’s, a Young Democrat club president from a very catholic school saw the continuing donors of their organization. They were all the older brothers at his school. The shift was coming. The bishops don’t have employees they have to worry about.
The US Catholic Church has always been very conservative when its own power was threatened: the Eastern Catholic immigrants, mostly from modern day Western Ukraine, incidentally, were subject to substantial discrimination by US bishops in late19th century because they “didn’t look like normal Catholics” and belonged to separate hierarchies outside their jurisdiction, this at a time when Pope Leo XIII was trying hard to solidify the plclace of Eastern Catholics in the Church.
Really appreciate these comments. My grandparents emigrated from Italy & Czechoslovakia 100 years ago to work the mines and mills of the Youngstown OH area: catholics all.
Yes the notion that religion is inherently a force for liberalism is dubious indeed. More typically ministers–who also have rice bowls–reflect the society in which they operate. A prime example would be the onetime Southern Baptist defense of slavery based on a Biblical interpretation.
Here in my area the Baptists have always been on the right end of the spectrum with the Unitarians over on the left. This isn’t a new thing or a George W. Bush thing. Since churches are also social institutions then in the US–where we have a broad choice–prospective members will often choose the church that matches their viewpoint rather than vice versa.
Which is not to say that there are not some churches have served as a force for social change. Indeed some of us have argued that religion may be needed to tame “greed is good” and other dogmas of our dominant secularity–itself a kind of religion.
Yet the Baptists started out as revolutionaries, being for instance one of the first churches to have women preachers.
In truth it’s very difficult to map from religious belief to politics. The same basic doctrine can lead to conservatism (“The King is God’s representative on Earth”) or radical egalitarianism (“Only God is Lord, no man is”). Both positions (and every other one here under the sun) have been embraced at one time or another by people calling themselves Christians.
onetime Southern Baptist defense of slavery
Its their reason for existing.
Religions are made of individuals, but as Stalin noted about the number of divisions the Pope had, priests of any stripe tend not to have standing armies and support the rightwing powers that be to protect their jewels.
I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. -MLK
Julian Bond in his old lecture class said this was a read between the lines bit. King is generally accompanied by atheists, socialists, and the Rev. Abernathy, not fellow ministers. This is an announcement of war. King is very close to encouraging blacks to abandon black churhces that aren’t on board and attend non-segregated, usually white churches.
But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us.
Its not “soaring rhetoric” but a message. Black ministers didn’t necessarily want integration as they thought wealthier donors would go to the “it” churches.
Before the fundamentalist takeover in 1968 or so, the Southern Baptists as a denomination were sort of Episcopalianism-lite as regards many social issues, abortion being one.
For that matter, the Catholic Council of Bishops was calling for national healthcare – as early as 1916.
The National Council of Churches was once an influential progressive voice. Its main office, now in DC, was in NYC, and gave important support to jobs guarantee advocates, among other peace/justice groups.
Prohibition was a “progressive” cause in its day, like eugenics. Social reformers on the left side of the spectrum had a number of causes that we now regard as misguided or abhorrent, but in their day they had many well-meaning proponents. When the “woke” culture has been dead and buried for a generation or two, many of its causes will likewise seem ridiculous or repulsive to those on the future left.
I wouldn’t say that the mainline Protestant churches were institutionally progressive but that they had a reading of scripture (then) that allowed space for many progressive individuals to feel justified in their socially responsible actions. The Christian commmunity has always had a divide between those who think “works” are important and those who think “faith” alone is sufficient for salvation. The right tends to emphasize the latter position, because works in the biblical sense often lead to actions helping the poor and afflicted. Faith alone plus predestination is what allows one to commit any sin, secure in the knowledge that one is already Saved (see George W. Bush).
The so-called “Social Gospel” was quite powerful in the 1880s 90s into the first half of the twentieth century. If you google it you will find a lot of information about it. It seems that prohibition was their only cause that was overwhelmingly popular. But they fought for racial integration, abolition of child labor and many other things, as well. After WW2 the red scare was a means of silencing many of them, but a few clergy were still active in opposing the Vietnam war, including Martin Luther King. Daniel Berrigan, among the best known.
I myself have often wondered at the apathy of the clergy today in speaking out against war and inequality. It seems the military-style “op” outlined in this thread is part of the explanation.
One would think that the original “steeplejacking” example in US “religious” history would be Methodists and their support for slavery. When they were radicals and outsiders interested in “liberation,” they questioned and challenged slavery. Once more prominent and powerful, they magically changed their tune on that great social evil, and became one of the biggest supporters of slavery. “Protestants” are frauds.
The DLC aspect is a good one to study because it provides an excellent example of the rules being flipped to benefit the parasites who voted themselves the boss of everyone.
“Professionalizing” the party was a big thing. Thirty years ago consultants still had credibility. The neoliberals brought in consultants who slowly removed the volunteer element from the party which made it all but impossible for the party’s base to monitor what its leadership was up to.
Removing the unpaid activists from the mix transformed the party from a church basement with a bar into a private club with locks on the doors from behind which they would emerge with new rules telling their base to shut up already and just do as they’re told and if they were serious about helping the party they’d help fundraising phone calls!
The party’s been like a greased pig going down a water slide to hell ever since.
The book The Canceling of the American Mind is a useful resource if only for the discussion of the specific techniques used by people across the spectrum for cancellation. As you read through those, you will recognize them.
Many of us are looking forward to, and quietly working toward, open dialog where issues may stand on their own feet.
Neuburger wrote: I’m not writing this to just trash the Right, though the Institutional Right is eminently trashable. I’m writing this to show how subversive operations like this work. Because there are many of them. And the rich, as you’ll see, on both sides use these tactics. (my emphasis)
Yet all of the examples of subversion presented here (aside from the animal example) emerged from either the far right (church subversions) or the center right (PBS and DLC). There are no examples of the “left rich” doing this. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and the (successful) effort to use Soros’ money to get leftish District Attorneys elected in the US may be one such example. I’m not sure it fits though, because it’s less about subversion than open overthrow. Also, there was plenty of reporting from mainstream press about the overthrow effort while it was at full strength.
It’s a Snow Day, so I went down the rabbit-hole of reading the original Swedenburg piece, his colleague Joel Gordon’s piece in Verso, their UA colleague Robert Steinbuch’s hit-piece in the Democrat-Gazette, and the linked 2001 Robert Dreyfuss TAP and 2014 Matt Stoller Medium DLC take-downs. As Yves is wont to exclaim: Hoo-boy!
How on earth would the Canary Mission and the Heritage Foundation even have a panel discussion at the University of Arkansas on their radar? It turns out that Swedenburg (who has taught in Israel) and Gordon (who is Jewish) are associated with the King Fahd School of Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Why did the KSA fund a school in Fayetteville? Well back in 1992 when it started looking like Slick Willie was going to be President of the USA, the House of Saud graft bandwagon got rolling early. The University of Arkansas has been on the Middle Eastern gravy train ever since. Arkansas being Arkansas, turf wars and political vendettas galore surround the institution.
Neuberger is too coy and you have to follow those links he casually drops. It all circles back to Slick Willie, Al From, and the DLC — the anti-populist and undemocratic Inverted Totalitarian organizing model that Karl Rove likely plagiarized in order to align Enron with the Southern Baptists.
Under From and Rove’s organizing model, the Saudis and the Israelis pull more strings in the USA than any member of the American public does. Meanwhile, the bodies continue to pile-up…
I’m reminded of a comment made by Alexander Cockburn back in the day about Al Gore (or maybe it was from an article he co-wrote with Jeffrey St. Clair): “He (Gore) uses the language of the New Deal to attack its substance.”
I think the real issue here is the society wide “steeplechasing” of every major institution or organization there is, public or private, left or right, regardless of ideology or goals, almost all of it has been subverted, taking over, and turned into grift machines at least in the United States. Almost all of the equivalents of the the rank and file and often even the majority of the middle management, are righteous, but the people in control, the senior management, are running the organization for personal profit.
I also think that the deliberately created corruption, under the guise that money is speech, in the government as well as the creation and implementation of Neoliberalism by hidden or stealthy organizations is the primary reason why. If the legislature, the executive, and the law at all levels from the smallest town to Congress are all corrupt, full of contempt for the average person and certainly for the poor, with the subcontracting of government functions to NGOs, which also have been corrupted, it really should not be surprising that everything else is as well. Think of the investors who have bought out all the very many businesses and sucked all the value out of them and then left the husk to be closed, if they did not just close down a competitor. Money is all and decency is for suckers, all that matters is making money in anyway possible, not matter how destructive, which leaves most people trapped and swimming in a poisoned sea looking for the few remaining overcrowded griftboats. People are forced to become grifters, to become soulless, just to “succeed.”
If this country, forget about Western Civilization, survives, it will be by overhauling, reforming, just about everything. We will need an amazing amount of luck. Well, we did survive the First Cold War, so there is that.
I mean, you might not like Marx, but he has a point about how corrosive to society is the effect of the capital accumulation. It’s just that back in the old days, the managers of capitalism could marshal resources and discipline agents of capitalism, all in the name of taking anticyclical actions AKA kicking the can down the road. But they can’t do that nowadays, because that ability has too been eliminated as capital looked for new frontier to expand. The effect is disastrous to both society and each individual.