Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.
The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. The CNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.
Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations. Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political trickster James O’Keefe; Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell; and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.
A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism.
The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”
This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.
Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.
Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”
Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”
