Predators and Prey: Subverting Liberal and Populist Institutions

The parasital spider wasp. The female lays eggs on paralyzed spiders. When they hatch, the spider is food. Image source: https://www.whatsthatbug.com/wasp-that-lays-eggs-in-spider/

By Thomas Neuburger

“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 that are friends of the University’s mission but enemies of their own — protection of Israel at all costs.

Subverting the Southern Baptist Convention

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.

George W. Bush and Karl Rove engineered an institutional takeover of faith communities. Note the role of Ralph Reed, head of the unironically named Christian Coalition, and Richard Land in the passage below (emphasis added):

Rove was one of the first in what became the campaign to elect George W. Bush to the White House to recognize and use the voters of the religious right. 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 parked Ralph at Enron. Ralph told me before the [2000] New Hampshire primary that he would do what it took to eliminate [GOP senator] John McCain as an opponent if he posed a challenge to Bush. He would do whatever it took, that means below the radar, paint his face. Ralph has a dual personality, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, charming in public and then ruthless and vicious."

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 helped Enron spread its message on Capitol Hill, and build grassroots support for energy deregulation. Reed sent a memo to Enron's executives touting his success at mobilizing "the faith community" on behalf of issues such as deregulation and slashing corporate taxes. The arrangement through Enron kept Reed's lobbying firm, Century Strategies, out of Bush's campaign records until 1999, and then only showed up in small increments that shielded Reed's role in the campaign.

Reed understood that conservative Christians were largely moral absolutists -- either you were with them or you were their mortal enemy. No middle ground. Every issue, every area of judgment, came down to the simplest of divisions between the secularists and the faithful, bad vs. good, skeptics vs. true believers. This mindset worked perfectly for Rove, who himself is a confessed agnostic with no real religious faith, but 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. Whether you're in the traditional side or whether you're on the post-modernist side," he says.

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.

“SBC'S Richard Land Says Obama 'Exploiting Trayvon Martin’s Death’” (sojo.net/articles/sbcs-richard-land-says-obama-jackson-sharpton-exploiting-trayvon-martins-death)

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 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'll 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.

Female Golden Hunting Wasp dragging paralysed spider to its nest

This is how PBS was subverted through the Reagan era — by the time Bush II became president, they happy to sell his war. This is how the DLC subverted the Democratic Party to work against worker interests and rights. Note the hand of the rich in all these stories.

Examples are everywhere. In essence, these are military ops using spook state tactics. These ops are why much of the world is the way it is.

But the tactic is often invisible, designed to be hidden. Which is why I wanted to bring it to your attention. What the Israeli government is doing here is a well-trod path.