# Nelson Bunker Hunt Nelson Bunker Hunt (1926–2014) was the **Texas oil heir who put up the founding money for much of the modern American religious right**. Son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, briefly the wealthiest man in the world (on paper) in the 1960s-70s, financier of everything from Campus Crusade for Christ's international evangelism to the John Birch Society's membership campaigns to the founding of the [[Council for National Policy]], and — in a separate but equally famous episode — the orchestrator (with his brothers Herbert and Lamar) of the 1979-80 attempt to corner the global silver market, which collapsed in 1980's "Silver Thursday" and ultimately cost the Hunt brothers their fortune. Hunt is the archetype of a recurring KB figure: the **eccentric conservative billionaire whose personal fortune quietly funded the movement's infrastructure for decades before anyone outside the movement knew who they were**. He is the precursor to a long line of later figures — [[the Kochs]], [[Peter Thiel]], [[Richard Mellon Scaife]] (overlapping), [[the Mercers]], [[Leonard Leo]]'s [[Marble Freedom Trust]] — who would play the same role in successive generations. ## Background - Born February 22, 1926, in El Dorado, Arkansas - Son of H.L. Hunt, founder of Hunt Oil and, by some reckonings, the wealthiest person in America in the 1950s - Attended the University of Texas at Austin but did not graduate - Served in the [[U.S. Navy]] during World War II - Inherited significant oil interests; discovered the massive Sarir oil field in [[Libya]] in 1961 (nationalized by Qaddafi in 1973, costing Hunt billions) - Became, for a period in the 1960s-70s, one of the richest individuals in the world - Died October 21, 2014, in Dallas, Texas, at age 88 ## The John Birch Society Era In the 1960s, Hunt was a major financier of the **[[John Birch Society]]**, the far-right anti-communist organization founded by [[Robert Welch]] in 1958. The Birch Society was the largest grassroots conservative organization of its era — infamous in mainstream circles for its paranoid conspiracism (e.g., Welch's claim that Dwight Eisenhower was "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy") but a significant base-building operation for right-wing activism. Hunt served on the Birch Society's National Council and funded its expansion. The Birch-Hunt-Welch ecosystem of the 1960s is part of the **prehistory of the modern right** that is often minimized in official movement-history narratives (William F. Buckley famously worked to marginalize the Birch Society at *National Review*), but it is a real institutional and financial precursor: many of the activists, organizing models, and conspiratorial tropes of modern right-wing politics trace to that ecosystem. See [[Old Right Ecosystem]] for the full through-line. ## The 1979-80 Silver Corner The most famous episode of Hunt's life — and the one that cost him his fortune — was the **attempted corner of the silver market** in 1979-80, orchestrated with his brothers Herbert and Lamar. The short version: In 1973, with inflation rising and the U.S. dollar under pressure, the Hunts began accumulating silver as a hedge. By 1979 they had acquired, by various reports, roughly one-third of the world's non-governmental silver supply — driving the price from $6/oz in early 1979 to a peak of about $49.45/oz in January 1980. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in coordination with the CFTC-regulated commodity exchanges, imposed new margin rules and position limits designed specifically to deflate the corner. On **[[Silver Thursday]]** (March 27, 1980), silver prices collapsed, the Hunts faced margin calls they couldn't cover, and the resulting unwinding — a federal rescue package and years of subsequent litigation and bankruptcy proceedings — ultimately destroyed most of their fortune. The episode is significant for two reasons in the KB context: 1. **Hunt's religious and political giving had a distinct "silver decade."** In the late 1970s, as the silver position rose, Hunt was uniquely cash-rich and funding the religious right and [[New Right]] at high intensity. The 1981 founding of CNP coincides with the end of that window. 2. **The 1980 collapse coincides with the Reagan era taking off.** Hunt's financial capacity declined precisely as the movement he had helped fund was ascending — an irony that meant the next generation of conservative funding (Coors, Bradley, Scaife, Olin) had to backfill a hole left by the Hunt decline. ## Religious and Political Philanthropy Hunt's donor footprint across the late 1960s and 1970s is one of the most significant in the prehistory of the modern religious right. Documented and reported giving targets: - **Campus Crusade for Christ** — Hunt was [[Bill Bright]]'s largest single donor. Bright is one of the two figures (with Loren Cunningham) credited with the original 1975 articulation of the [[Seven Mountain Mandate]]. Without Hunt, Campus Crusade's global expansion in the 1960s-70s is hard to imagine. - **The John Birch Society** (1960s) — major funder and National Council member. - **The Council for National Policy** (1981) — founding seed donor and founding member. - **Right-wing media and political organizations** — a long list, including Western Goals Foundation (a private intelligence-gathering operation that collapsed in scandal after Hunt's associate John Rees was exposed), the [[Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress]] (Weyrich's operation), and various anti-communist and pro-Rhodesia/South Africa efforts. - **Jesus Film Project** — Hunt was the principal funder of the 1979 *Jesus* film (Campus Crusade production), which has since been translated into 2,000+ languages and shown globally, claiming to be the most-translated film in history. ## Council for National Policy (1981) Hunt is the **founding seed donor** of CNP. The founding meeting — convened by [[Tim LaHaye]] in 1981 — needed three things: a pastor-convener (LaHaye), an institutional architect (Weyrich), and money. Hunt provided the money. [[Joseph Coors]] provided additional founding capital. The initial CNP budget was modest by later standards, but critically, it was available *before* the organization had produced any product, at a moment when the Reagan coalition was still forming. Hunt remained a member and funder for the rest of his life, though his giving capacity diminished substantially after Silver Thursday. ## Post-Silver-Thursday Reduction The 1980 silver-market collapse and subsequent SEC and CFTC enforcement actions eventually forced Hunt into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1988. Legal settlements, tax claims, and continued litigation consumed what remained. Hunt lived in substantially reduced circumstances in Dallas for the rest of his life (though never in poverty — the Hunt family holdings were diversified enough to leave him comfortable by ordinary standards). His role in movement conservatism shrank accordingly. ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[Council for National Policy]]**: Founding seed donor. Without Hunt, CNP does not launch in 1981. - **The donor-funding prehistory**: Hunt is the template for the later generations of conservative donor-funders — the figure who shows that a single billionaire can materially accelerate a movement by funding the right institutions at the right moment. [[Peter Thiel]], the Mercers, Leonard Leo's dark-money network, and the Koch network are all operating within a paradigm Hunt helped establish. - **[[Seven Mountain Mandate]]**: Hunt's Campus Crusade funding supported the ministry of Bill Bright, the figure who (with Loren Cunningham) articulated the original Seven Mountain framing in 1975. The theological DNA of modern Christian nationalism thus routes through Hunt dollars. - **John Birch Society prehistory**: The Birch ecosystem Hunt funded in the 1960s is one of the institutional seedbeds of modern right-wing politics — a connection official movement histories often minimize but which is present in the documentary record. - **The "silver decade" coincidence**: The 1973-1980 rise of Hunt's silver position — the period when Hunt was at maximum financial capacity — exactly overlaps the period when the New Right infrastructure was being built (Heritage 1973, ALEC 1973/1975, Conservative Caucus 1974, [[Moral Majority]] 1979, CNP founding conversations 1979-1981). That timing is probably not a coincidence. ## See Also - [[Council for National Policy]] - [[Council for National Policy Ecosystem]] - [[Old Right Ecosystem]] — Hunt's JBS-era milieu and its through-lines to MAGA - [[John Birch Society]] - [[Robert Welch]] - [[Tim LaHaye]] - [[Paul Weyrich]] - [[Howard Phillips]] - [[Richard Viguerie]] - [[Phyllis Schlafly]] - [[The Unholy Alliance]] - [[Texas History Hub]]