# Council for National Policy Ecosystem The **coordinating body of the American right**. If [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] is the funding architecture and [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] is the idea-production layer, CNP is the **room where the architects of both meet** — three times a year, in private, with the directory locked, the press excluded, and the agenda off the record. Founded in 1981 by [[Tim LaHaye]], [[Paul Weyrich]], [[Howard Phillips]], [[Richard Viguerie]], [[Phyllis Schlafly]], and [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]], the Council for National Policy is the connective tissue that makes the right a coalition rather than a collection of rival factions. **Core thesis:** Every other ecosystem in this KB — dark money, think tanks, Christian nationalism, defense tech, [[the New Right]], the legal movement, the donor class — has a visible organizational chart. CNP is the **invisible** chart that connects all of them. Its members don't just know each other; they have been meeting three times a year for forty-plus years, with dues structures, seating charts, and succession planning. The reason the American right so consistently out-coordinates the left is not superior ideology or superior messaging. It is CNP. There is no comparable institution on the American center-left: the closest analog (the Democracy Alliance) is younger, smaller, less disciplined, and far more ideologically fractious. → For the funding flows, see [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] → For the public-facing policy machine, see [[Heritage Foundation]], [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] → For the religious-right base, see [[Family Research Council]], [[Seven Mountain Mandate]], [[Christian Reconstructionism]] → For the judicial arm, see [[Federalist Society]], [[Leonard Leo]] → For the master concept, see [[The Unholy Alliance]] --- ## Why CNP Exists The founding story is essential for understanding the institution's DNA. In 1981, the incoming Reagan coalition was a jury-rigged alliance of four tribes that had mostly *hated each other* throughout the 1960s and '70s: - **Traditional business conservatives** (Chamber of Commerce Republicans, paleocon nationalists like [[Pat Buchanan]]) - **The new religious right** (Southern Baptists, Catholic conservatives, the newly politicized evangelical base built by [[Jerry Falwell]]'s [[Moral Majority]], [[Tim LaHaye]]'s publishing empire, and [[Phyllis Schlafly]]'s anti-ERA [[Eagle Forum]]) - **Cold-War anti-communist hawks** (defense-industry-aligned, Committee on the Present Danger types) - **The Goldwater/libertarian wing** (direct-mail fundraisers like [[Richard Viguerie]], think-tank builders like [[Paul Weyrich]]) The strategic problem was keeping them together *after* the election. Each faction had its own grievances, its own institutions, and its own reasons to defect. The model the founders looked at — explicitly — was the **[[Council on Foreign Relations]]** and the **Trilateral Commission**, the elite coordinating bodies of the mid-20th-century liberal establishment. The argument was: if the establishment has a room where its financiers, journalists, academics, and politicians meet privately to align priorities, the right needs one too. So they built one. The name was deliberate: *Council for National Policy* — bland, vague, and undisclosive. The structure was deliberate too: invite-only, dues-funded, confidential membership, no public output. --- ## How CNP Works The basic architecture: ``` [ ~400 Invite-Only Members ] ↓ +-----------------+ +-----------------+ | Annual Dues | | NDAs / Secrecy | | (tiered: Gold, | | (confidentiality| | Silver, Regular)| | by design) | +-----------------+ +-----------------+ ↓ [ 3 Meetings / Year ] (winter + spring + late summer; rotating undisclosed resort/conference venues) ↓ +----------------+ +----------------+ +----------------+ | Agenda-Setting | | Personnel | | Deal Matching | | Panels | | Market | | (donor <-> org)| +----------------+ +----------------+ +----------------+ ↓ [ No Public Output ] Instead: alignment flows OUT through the members' own institutions — Heritage publishes blueprints, FRC distributes voter guides, Federalist Society recommends judges, NRA mobilizes voters, etc. ``` **Why the structure is load-bearing:** The absence of public output is not a side effect — it is the core feature. Public coalitions are fragile because they can be attacked, forced to take unpopular positions on the record, and dissolved by internal disagreement. A private coalition that only exists as *relationships* cannot be attacked from the outside, because there is nothing public to attack. ### The Three Legal Entities | Entity | Type | Function | |---|---|---| | **Council for National Policy Inc.** | 501(c)(3) | The parent "educational" body; hosts meetings, holds the directory, cannot legally do sustained lobbying | | **CNP Action, Inc.** | 501(c)(4) | The advocacy vehicle; lobbies, publishes *Heard Around the Hill*, coordinates with campaigns | | **CNP Education & Research Foundation** | 501(c)(3) | Historical grant-receiving entity; current operational status unclear | The three-entity structure is the same template used across the right-wing legal/political world: a (c)(3) to do "education" and receive tax-deductible grants, a (c)(4) to do politics, and sometimes a PAC or super-PAC affiliate. It lets the network keep the same people in charge while funneling different kinds of money through whichever vehicle has the legal latitude for a given task. --- ## The Rings of the CNP Ecosystem CNP can be mapped as concentric rings — a small leadership core, a wider body of member-principals representing major institutions, and the vast institutional ecosystem those members **bring to the table**. ### Ring 1: The Leadership Core The people who actually run the organization. **Current (2026):** - **[[Bob McEwen]]** — Executive Director; former U.S. Representative (R-Ohio, 1981–1993); longtime movement organizer; public face of CNP's limited external activity - **[[William Walton]]** — Board President; Heritage Foundation trustee; private-equity and conservative-media investor; also active in CNP Action - **[[Cleta Mitchell]]** — Board member and policy committee chair; elections attorney; founder of [[Election Integrity Network]]; operational spine of the post-2020 election-integrity mobilization - **[[Ed Meese]]** — Listed as CNP director in recent tax filings; Reagan Attorney General; [[Project 2025]] contributor; living link to the founding generation **Historical:** Past leadership has included successive presidents from the religious right, the donor class, and the think-tank world — the rotation itself is part of the coalition-maintenance function. ### Ring 2: Member-Principals by Faction The ~400 members themselves are organized by faction, and the factional balance of the membership roster is itself a coalition-balancing exercise. #### 2a. Religious Right (the largest faction) The founding faction and numerically dominant bloc. | Member | Institution | Role | |---|---|---| | [[Tony Perkins]] | [[Family Research Council]] | Longest-tenured principal; religious-right anchor | | [[James Dobson]] | [[Focus on the Family]] (founder) | Movement patriarch; built the evangelical political machine | | [[Ralph Reed]] | [[Faith and Freedom Coalition]] | Voter-mobilization architect; [[Christian Coalition]] alumnus | | [[Franklin Graham]] | [[Samaritan's Purse]] / BGEA | Evangelical institutional heir | | [[David Barton]] | [[WallBuilders]] | Christian-nationalist historical-revisionism shop | | [[Kenneth Copeland]] | Prosperity gospel empire | Historical link to Trump evangelical orbit | #### 2b. Dark-Money & Judicial Operators The money and the courts layer. | Member | Institution | Role | |---|---|---| | [[Leonard Leo]] | [[Federalist Society]] / [[Marble Freedom Trust]] | Controls $1.6B+ judicial-network vault; six SCOTUS confirmations | | Morton Blackwell | Leadership Institute (founder) | Conservative-operative training pipeline since 1979 | | [[Cleta Mitchell]] | Election Integrity Network / Foley & Lardner (former) | Election-integrity operational lead | #### 2c. Political Figures & Operators Current and former officeholders and campaign personnel. | Member | Role | Notes | |---|---|---| | [[Mike Pence]] | Former U.S. Vice President | Joined by Jan. 2022 (Documented leak) | | [[Mike Johnson]] | U.S. Speaker of the House | Reported CNP participant during House-leadership ascent | | [[Kellyanne Conway]] | Former Trump counselor | Longtime CNP participant | | [[Kris Kobach]] | Kansas AG | Immigration-restriction and "election integrity" litigation pipeline | | [[Jenna Ellis]] | Former Trump attorney | Added to 2022 Documented list | | [[Ed Meese]] | Former Reagan AG | Senior-statesman link; Project 2025 contributor | #### 2d. Movement Organizers & Donors The donor-class and activist-organizer layer. | Member | Institution / Role | |---|---| | [[Steve Bannon]] | War Room / Bannonite populism | | [[Rebekah Mercer]] | Mercer family political operation | | [[Charlie Kirk]] | [[Turning Point USA Ecosystem]]; joined CNP orbit in late 2010s; [[Assassination of Charlie Kirk]] | | [[Wayne LaPierre]] | [[NRA]] (during his tenure) | #### 2e. Founders & Legacy Members The founding generation, many now deceased, whose institutions remain central. - **[[Tim LaHaye]]** — Evangelical pastor, *Left Behind* co-author, Moral Majority co-founder; CNP's principal convener - **[[Paul Weyrich]]** — Co-founder of [[Heritage Foundation]] (1973) and [[ALEC]] (1975); the institutional architect - **[[Howard Phillips]]** — Conservative Caucus founder; Constitution Party presidential candidate - **[[Richard Viguerie]]** — Direct-mail fundraising pioneer; invented the conservative donor file - **[[Phyllis Schlafly]]** — Eagle Forum founder; defeated the Equal Rights Amendment; grass-roots anti-feminist movement builder - **[[Nelson Bunker Hunt]]** — Texas oil heir; attempted 1980 silver-market corner; founding seed donor - **[[Joseph Coors]]** — Brewer; founding funder across Heritage, CNP, and other early movement infrastructure - **[[Pat Robertson]]** — [[Christian Broadcasting Network]] / 700 Club; religious-right media power - **Jerry Falwell Sr.** — Moral Majority founder; brought Southern Baptists into the coalition - **[[Edwin Feulner]]** — Heritage Foundation founding president ### Ring 3: The Institutional Ecosystem Members Bring The point of CNP is that each member is a principal of an institution. The full institutional roster represented at any given meeting is much larger than the membership itself — it's the full galaxy of organizations the members run: - **Think tanks:** [[Heritage Foundation]], [[Claremont Institute]], [[Hillsdale College]], [[Manhattan Institute]], [[American Enterprise Institute]], Leadership Institute - **Judicial / legal:** [[Federalist Society]], [[Alliance Defending Freedom]], [[Liberty Counsel]], [[First Liberty Institute]] - **Religious-right infrastructure:** [[Family Research Council]], [[Faith and Freedom Coalition]], [[WallBuilders]], Focus on the Family, Eagle Forum, [[Concerned Women for America]] - **Gun-rights:** [[NRA]], [[Gun Owners of America]] - **State-level:** [[ALEC]], [[State Policy Network]] (66 state-based think tanks) - **Dark-money vehicles:** [[Bradley Foundation]], [[DonorsTrust]], Marble Freedom Trust, [[Castle Rock Foundation]], [[Sarah Scaife Foundation]] - **Youth pipelines:** Leadership Institute, [[Turning Point USA Ecosystem]], Young America's Foundation - **Media:** *American Conservative*, Daily Signal (Heritage), *[[National Review]]* circles, Trinity Broadcasting Network orbit - **Operational hubs:** [[Conservative Partnership Institute]] (CPI — founded by [[Jim DeMint]]; houses Election Integrity Network and [[Center for Renewing America]]) --- ## What CNP Actually Does Five functions, none of which CNP **publicly** claims. ### 1. Strategic Alignment (the core product) Three annual meetings. Each meeting produces a shared agenda for the quarter. The agenda is not published, but it is observable in the subsequent months through the *coordinated* public activity of members' institutions: the same talking points appearing simultaneously in Heritage publications, FRC voter guides, Federalist Society events, NRA mailings, and *Claremont Review of Books* essays. ### 2. Personnel Matching (the deep-state builder) CNP is the most efficient **people market** in American politics. A donor with money to deploy, a candidate looking for staff, a think tank looking for fellows, an incoming administration staffing 4,000 political appointments — all converge on CNP. The 30,000-name personnel database behind [[Heritage Foundation]]'s Project 2025 is a direct product of three decades of CNP relationship-building. The "deep state" the right accuses the left of having is, in important ways, a mirror-image project the right has actually built through CNP. ### 3. Coalition Enforcement (the factional negotiator) The internal disagreements of the American right are real: libertarians vs. Christian nationalists, hawks vs. restrainers, paleocons vs. neocons, Koch-style free-traders vs. [[JD Vance]]-style industrial-policy nationalists. CNP is the forum where these factions negotiate *in private*. The result is that public-facing disagreement is dampened — the movement can project unity because the disunity has been worked out in the room. ### 4. Idea Laundering (the test-bed) Ideas from the edges of the movement — Christian Reconstructionist theology, dissident-right intellectual experiments, [[Claremont Institute]] post-liberal theorizing — are pitched to the CNP room before going public. A pitch that lands well gets funding, speaker slots, and institutional backing. A pitch that flops is abandoned. This filter is why the right's "fringe" ideas so often arrive in mainstream politics already polished. ### 5. Post-2020 Election-Integrity Mobilization (the crisis product) In the specific period from November 2020 through January 6, 2021, and continuing afterward, CNP and CNP Action played a documented role in the post-election pressure campaign. [[Cleta Mitchell]]'s Election Integrity Network — formally launched in 2021 under Conservative Partnership Institute sponsorship but operationally rooted in CNP relationships — became the state-level infrastructure for voter-registration challenges, proof-of-citizenship advocacy, and the 2024 [[SAVE Act]] pressure campaign. [[Ginni Thomas]] served on CNP Action's board during this period. This was the first time CNP's coordinating function was visible in a real-time political crisis, and the first time investigators and journalists had the opportunity to map the coordination in detail. --- ## The CNP → Project 2025 Pipeline [[Heritage Foundation]]'s Project 2025 is, functionally, **the CNP coalition made visible**. The relationship is not formal — Project 2025 is a Heritage property, not a CNP product — but the overlap is structural: ``` CNP (the private coalition, 1981 → present) ↓ supplies the relationships Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI, founded 2017) ↓ supplies the logistics Heritage Foundation ↓ supplies the brand and publishing platform Project 2025 / Mandate for Leadership (2023) ↓ distributes to · 920-page policy blueprint · 30,000-name personnel database · 110+ coalition organizations · [[Second Trump Administration]] staffing ``` Analysis by the **Global Project Against Hate and Extremism** found that CNP members held leadership or advisory roles in more than 20% of the organizations that contributed to Project 2025. [[Kevin Roberts]] (Heritage president, Project 2025 architect) moves in the CNP orbit; [[Ed Meese]] is simultaneously a CNP director and a Project 2025 contributor; CPI (Jim DeMint's operation) functions as the connective logistics layer. This is the CNP coalition delivering an institutional product on a schedule — the most consequential product of its existence so far. --- ## The Historical Arc ### 1981–1988: The Founding & Reagan Era CNP organizes the Reagan coalition after the election. Religious right, donor class, hawks, and Goldwater libertarians meet three times a year. Member institutions (Heritage, Eagle Forum, Moral Majority, NRA) populate Reagan appointments and set the 1980s social-policy agenda. ### 1989–2000: The Wilderness & Rebuild Bush I (1988–92) partially alienates the movement. Clinton years (1993–2001) push CNP into opposition. The network rebuilds through the [[Gingrich Revolution]] (1994 midterms), the Contract with America, and the impeachment fight. Christian Coalition (Ralph Reed) becomes the breakout voter-mobilization operation. Federalist Society (founded 1982) begins producing its first generation of federal judges. ### 2001–2008: Bush II & "Bush's Brain" [[Karl Rove]] and the Bush White House work with CNP members on judicial nominations, social-policy positioning, and the 2004 evangelical-turnout operation. CNP's role expands in judicial strategy as Federalist Society / Leonard Leo infrastructure matures. ### 2009–2016: Tea Party, Obama Opposition, and the Rise of Movement Media Tea Party energy fuses with CNP's donor infrastructure. [[Americans for Prosperity]] (Koch), [[FreedomWorks]], and Heritage Action scale. Movement media ([[Steve Bannon]]'s Breitbart, [[Rebekah Mercer]]'s media investments) enters the CNP orbit. The network begins its pivot from Bush-era fusionism toward nationalist-populist posture. ### 2017–2020: The First Trump Presidency CNP members populate the administration (Pence VP, Meese advisory role, Leo-network judges). Federalist Society places three Supreme Court justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett). Heritage provides the *[[Mandate for Leadership]]* template that will become Project 2025's precursor. ### 2020–2021: The January 6 Window The one period in CNP's history when its coordinating function became **partially visible to the public**. The August 2020 CNP meeting in Arlington hosted election-integrity panels. [[Cleta Mitchell]] briefed members. [[Ginni Thomas]] sat on CNP Action's board during the disinformation-and-pressure campaign. ([[Ginni Thomas]]'s texts to [[Mark Meadows]] and communications with [[John Eastman]] were later subpoenaed.) The membership lists leaked in 2020 and 2022 made the institutional scale of the network legible for the first time since *Shadow Network* (2019). ### 2021–2024: The Project 2025 Assembly & Return CPI, Heritage, and CNP members assemble the coalition behind Project 2025. Mitchell's Election Integrity Network scales across 50 states. The SAVE Act pressure campaign runs through 2024. Leo's Marble Freedom Trust announces a **$1 billion** commitment to media/cultural influence (Sept. 2024 *FT* reporting). ### 2025–present: The Second Administration & "Delivery" Project 2025 personnel populate Trump's second-administration appointments. CNP's coordinating function shifts from opposition-coalition mode to **governing-coalition mode**: the challenge is no longer building consensus for a future administration but managing factional strain inside one actively governing. Reports of tension (e.g., May 2025 Trump criticism of [[Leonard Leo]]) suggest that even CNP's coordination can be stressed by Trump's personalism — but the institutional infrastructure is intact and producing. --- ## Tension Map: Faction Fault Lines CNP Has to Manage | Tension | Between | At stake | |---|---|---| | Theology vs. secular power | Religious right ↔ Tech/libertarian wings | Whether the coalition is *for* a Christian republic or *for* individual liberty | | Immigration | Christian nationalist humanitarians ↔ restrictionists (FAIR/Tanton, Miller) | Legal vs. illegal immigration; birthright citizenship; refugee policy | | Foreign policy | Hawks (Cold War legacy) ↔ Restrainers (Buchananite, Vance-style) | Ukraine, Iran, China, defense spending, alliance structure | | Economics | Free-traders (Koch) ↔ Industrial-policy nationalists (Vance, Cass) | Tariffs, China policy, antitrust, labor | | Tactics | Institutional conservatives (Heritage, AEI) ↔ Movement accelerationists (Bannon, Claremont New Right) | Reform vs. revolution; incrementalism vs. "flood the zone" | | Personalism | Trump-first loyalists ↔ Movement-first institutionalists | Whether the coalition serves Trump or Trump serves the coalition | CNP's job, at every meeting, is to prevent these tensions from becoming public splits. The model is **keep it in the family**. --- ## Cross-Ecosystem Connections | CNP Connection Point | Ecosystem | What Moves Through | |---|---|---| | [[Leonard Leo]], Marble Freedom Trust | [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] | $1.6B+ judicial/cultural spending; SCOTUS pipeline | | [[Heritage Foundation]], [[Claremont Institute]] | [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] | Project 2025; personnel database; policy blueprints | | [[Tony Perkins]], [[Ralph Reed]], [[David Barton]] | Christian nationalist wing | Voter guides; Seven Mountain theology; Christian school networks | | [[Steve Bannon]], [[Rebekah Mercer]] | [[Media Ecosystem]] | Breitbart infrastructure; populist media vector | | [[Charlie Kirk]] | [[Turning Point USA Ecosystem]] | Youth pipeline; campus organizing | | [[Wayne LaPierre]] (during tenure) | Gun-rights movement | NRA voter mobilization; [[Alexander Torshin]]/[[Maria Butina]] Russian overlay | | [[Cleta Mitchell]], [[Ginni Thomas]] | [[Conspiracy Theories Ecosystem]] | [[Stop the Steal]]; election-integrity operational layer | | [[Kris Kobach]], FAIR orbit | Immigration-restriction movement | State-level litigation; voter-roll challenges | | [[Ed Meese]], [[Kellyanne Conway]] | Government/administration | Reagan-era continuity; Trump-administration staffing | --- ## What's *Not* in CNP (and what that tells us) The **absences** from CNP's membership are analytically informative: - **The Silicon Valley tech-right is mostly absent.** [[Peter Thiel]], [[Marc Andreessen]], [[Elon Musk]], [[Balaji Srinivasan]], [[David Sacks]] — none are documented CNP members. The tech-right is a *parallel* network (the All-In podcast circle, [[Rockbridge Network]], [[Founders Fund]] orbit) that has grown rapidly since 2020 but did not come up through CNP. This is one of the most important structural features of the current right: there are now **two coordinating networks** — the old CNP/religious-right/Heritage spine, and the new Thiel/Rockbridge/Silicon Valley spine — connected by figures like [[JD Vance]] who operate across both, but not organizationally merged. - **The explicit dissident right is absent.** [[Curtis Yarvin]], [[Bronze Age Pervert]], [[Nick Fuentes]] — not members. CNP maintains respectability distance from the dissident right even as CNP-adjacent figures (Claremont, [[Tucker Carlson]]) cross-pollinate with that world. - **The Koch network is semi-separate.** [[Charles Koch]]'s operation has its own donor-coordinating mechanism (the Koch donor summits, [[Stand Together]]), historically overlapping with but not identical to CNP. The 2024 Koch-AFP rejection of Trump in the primary reveals the structural distance. - **The MAGA personalism layer is awkward.** Trump himself has never been a CNP member. The coalition is *served* by CNP but not *controlled* by CNP — a mismatch that creates the recurring tension Reports of the May 2025 Trump-Leo rift suggest. These absences are the reason CNP is not a comprehensive map of the modern right. It is the map of the *institutionally disciplined* right — the forty-year coalition — and the absence of the tech-right, the dissident right, and MAGA personalism is precisely what the next generation of the movement is being built around. --- ## Key People (Cross-Faction Connectors) These are the people who appear in multiple CNP sub-factions — the nodes that hold the coalition together. - **[[Leonard Leo]]** — Religious-right (Catholic) + judicial + dark-money + now cultural influence ($1B commitment) - **[[Cleta Mitchell]]** — Board governance + election-integrity + [[Ginni Thomas]] / SCOTUS orbit - **[[Ed Meese]]** — Reagan-era legacy + current board + Project 2025 - **[[Tony Perkins]]** — Religious right + political lobbying + Trump evangelical orbit - **[[Kevin Roberts]]** — Heritage + Project 2025 + CNP orbit + [[JD Vance]] bridge to tech-right --- ## What's Missing from This Map (Research Frontier) Areas that need deeper investigation: 1. **The current (2026) membership directory.** The most recent comprehensive leak is from January 2022. Additions during the second Trump administration are confidential. Who has been added? Who has been removed? 2. **The CPI–CNP relationship in detail.** Conservative Partnership Institute is clearly the operational logistics layer for CNP in the 2020s, but the precise division of labor (which decisions happen at CNP meetings vs. CPI project rooms) is underreported. 3. **The tech-right interface.** How does CNP relate to the [[Rockbridge Network]]? Do they coordinate, compete, or ignore each other? [[JD Vance]] moves across both — what does that actually look like operationally? 4. **International ties.** Do CNP meetings include non-U.S. counterparts (European national-conservative networks, Orbán-orbit figures, Brazilian evangelical-right leaders)? [[Steve Bannon]]'s international populist project suggests yes; the documentary record is thin. 5. **The succession problem.** The founding generation is mostly gone (LaHaye, Weyrich, Phillips, Schlafly, Hunt, Coors). The second generation (Meese, Dobson) is aging. Who inherits the coordinating function? 6. **The financial detail.** How much money actually *moves through* CNP's three entities vs. *around* them via members' own institutions? The public-facing budget is modest; the actual coordinated flow is likely orders of magnitude larger. 7. **Post-2020 legal exposure.** Subpoenas to [[Ginni Thomas]], [[Mark Meadows]], [[John Eastman]], and others generated documentary evidence of CNP-related coordination. Has any of this produced legal liability for CNP as an institution? --- ## See Also ### Master concepts - [[The Unholy Alliance]] — Cross-faction coordination as the central feature of the modern right - [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] — Where the money flows - [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] — Where the ideas are manufactured - [[The New Right Ecosystem]] — The ideological layer CNP partially contains and partially does not - [[Turning Point USA Ecosystem]] — A parallel youth-coalition case study ### Core institutions - [[Council for National Policy]] — The organization record - [[Heritage Foundation]] — Public-facing policy partner; Project 2025 - [[Family Research Council]] — Religious-right anchor - [[Federalist Society]] — Judicial pipeline partner - [[Alliance Defending Freedom]] — Christian-right legal vehicle - [[Bradley Foundation]] — Key CNP funder - [[DonorsTrust]] — Anonymization vehicle - [[Claremont Institute]] — Intellectual bridge to the New Right - [[ALEC]] — State-level legislative operation (Weyrich co-founding) - [[State Policy Network]] — 66-state think-tank ecosystem - [[Faith and Freedom Coalition]] — Ralph Reed's post-Christian-Coalition vehicle - [[WallBuilders]] — David Barton's Christian-nationalist historical operation - [[NRA]] — Gun-rights wing ### Key people - [[Leonard Leo]] — Dark-money/judicial anchor - [[Cleta Mitchell]] — Election-integrity operational lead - [[Tony Perkins]] — Religious-right principal - [[James Dobson]] — Movement patriarch - [[Ralph Reed]] — Voter-mobilization architect - [[Steve Bannon]] — Populist-media bridge - [[Rebekah Mercer]] — Donor-operator - [[Charlie Kirk]] — Youth pipeline - [[Wayne LaPierre]] — NRA (during tenure) - [[Mike Pence]] — Political bridge - [[Mike Johnson]] — House leadership - [[Ed Meese]] — Founding-generation link + Project 2025 - [[Kevin Roberts]] — Heritage + Project 2025 architect - [[Ginni Thomas]] — CNP Action board; Stop the Steal coordination - [[Kellyanne Conway]] — Trump-world operator - [[Tim LaHaye]] — Founder - [[Paul Weyrich]] — Founder; Heritage/ALEC architect - [[Howard Phillips]] — Founder - [[Richard Viguerie]] — Founder; direct-mail pioneer - [[Phyllis Schlafly]] — Founder; anti-ERA - [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]] — Founding seed donor