Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.
Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
In 2009, the GOP candidate introduced Glenn Beck at a fundraiser for a school that promoted the work of a conservative "nutjob" eschewed by the Mormon church.
In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate, lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the "blessings of slavery." Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University.
On May 30, 2009, George Wythe University (named after the first law professor in America, who was a teacher of Thomas Jefferson), held a fundraising gala at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Beck, who was then riding high as a Fox News host, was the special guest, tapped to receive the school's annual "Statesman Award." Romney introduced him.
In a video message—obtained by Mother Jones—that was recorded for the event, Romney praised Beck and this school, which the US Department of Justice has called a "diploma mill." He hailed George Wythe University and its supporters for "building statesmen" and "moving forward the cause of liberty and building men and women of virtue and wisdom, diplomacy, and courage." He introduced Beck as a "man who is really making an impact in our entire country today." Romney noted that Beck's "approach is refreshing" and that he "tries to focus his message on action…on learning the principles of freedom and liberty, on standing up and making your voice heard, on reading and applying the wisdom of our nation's founders to the challenges of today." Beck, he asserted, was "a statesman in his own right." Here's the video:
At the time of the fundraiser, Beck had established himself as a champion of the far right who peddled extreme and conspiratorial views. In the weeks prior to this event, he had declared that President Barack Obama was "clearly" a socialist who had "surrounded himself with Marxists his whole life," and Beck had told listeners of his radio show that Obama will "surely take away your gun or take away you ability to shoot a gun." Yet Beck was a towering figure on the right and a favorite of the emerging tea party movement. It was not odd that Romney, anticipating another presidential run, would seek to win his favor and proclaim him a "statesman." His endorsement of George Wythe (pronounced "with") University was more curious.
The school was founded in 1992 by Oliver DeMille, along with two other Skousen associates. DeMille is described in a 2007 university catalog as "a popular keynote speaker, writer, and business consultant" who earned a master's degree in "Christian Political Science" and a doctorate in religious education at the unaccredited and now-defunct Coral Ridge Baptist University. In 1992, DeMille published an over-the-top tract, The New World Order: Choosing Between Christ and Satan in the Last Days, in which he and his coauthor wrote:
The term "New World Order" means the same thing today—abolishment of Christianity and the adoption of Satan's plan—whether spoken in lodges and meetings of secret societies or on national television by George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. This does not mean that Bush or Gorbachev are Satan-worshippers, but they have accepted his plan—that governments should use force to make people live correctly.
The book also noted:
During the coming year the secret combinations and the governments they control will do a number of things to build a Satanic New World Order. President Bush and many Congressmen, who are controlled by the secret societies, will attempt to further this cause and to continue the curtailment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
DeMille's book endorsed an assortment of conservative conspiracy theories, including the notion that the "Establishment" was going to turn the United States into a socialist state, disarm the American military and put it under United Nations control, and merge the country with Mexico, Canada, and other Latin American countries. (According to an official history of GWU, DeMille later considered the publication of this book a mistake.)
In the program for the 2009 Beck-Romney fundraiser, DeMille's welcome message sounded the alarm: "The figurative redcoats are at our door as threats to our liberty, prosperity, and sovereignty are no longer ideological or symbolic, but very real and immediate." One way to preserve liberty, he noted, was to donate to George Wythe University.
The school was established in a hunting lodge in southern Utah purchased by William Doughty, a Skousen devotee who also wanted to create a self-sufficient alternative community for conservatives who believed that the Constitution was being dismantled by the US government. The initial plans called for a center devoted to Skousen and his writings and a constitutional theme park populated by Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry impersonators. Skousen and his family donated more than $100,000 and gave their blessing to Doughty's fundraising efforts.
The constitutional utopia never materialized. Doughty came under investigation for allegedly bilking investors and donors out of $1 million. (No further action was ever taken against him.) But George Wythe University held on and continued to advance the work of Skousen, a conspiratorialist in his own right, who advocated extreme views across a wide range of subjects.
In a 1962 book, Skousen denounced homosexuality and noted, "Every boy should know that masturbation may be the first step to homosexuality." In his 1970 book, The Naked Capitalist, Skousen asserted that a sinister "secret society of the London-Wall Street axis"—which included the Council on Foreign Relations—controlled the world and manipulated global events, financing revolutions and aligning itself with "dictatorial forces" to preserve its power. In a 1970 article, Skousen, who was active with the John Birch Society, claimed that criticism of the Mormon church for prohibiting African Americans from its priesthood was nothing but a communist conspiracy against the church. (He also recorded a spoken-word album for the John Birch Society on the dangers of LSD.) In The Five Thousand Year Leap, a supposed history influenced by Mormon theology and published in 1981, Skousen contended that the Constitution is rooted in the bible. (Beck has heavily promoted the book to his listeners and viewers and wrote the introduction to a new edition.)
In 1979, the Mormon church issued a directive distancing itself from an organization started by Skousen. Five years ago, the conservative National Reviewreferred to Skousen as an "all-around nutjob."
Still, until 2010, George Wythe University taught Skousen's work as part of its core curricula, alongside such classics as Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Tom Paine's Common Sense. Freshmen were assigned The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Making of America, which came close to idealizing slavery, as in a passage in the book quoting a 1934 essay: "If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates." While promoting The Making of America, Skousen called for eliminating a host of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; for selling off national parks; for ending the direct election of US senators; and for weakening the separation of church and state.
In a 2007 radio interview, Romney said that he had not read The Making of America, but that it was "worth reading." Romney cited another Skousen book to explain Mormon theology regarding the second coming of Christ. In another radio interview that year, Romney recalled taking a class at BYU on the Bible taught by Skousen, whom he called "a brilliant man and a wonderful story teller."
George Wythe University has never been accredited, and for most of its history, its leadership has been comprised of people who earned their academic credentials from other unaccredited schools. (Andrew Groft, a recent president whose degrees came from George Wythe, was caught in a prostitution sting shortly after leaving the school.) For years, the school handed out generous "life experience" credits toward a Ph.D. in a host of different specialties. One of the school's most famous doctorate recipients is former Michigan congressman Mark Siljander. He served for a couple of years as a George Wythe trustee and earned a Ph.D. in international business from the school after writing a 10-page dissertation and attending no classes. In 2010, Siljander pleaded guilty to charges he had been an unregistered lobbyist for an Islamic charity with terrorist ties. In his sentencing memo, the Department of Justice labeled George Wythe University a "diploma mill."
Since its inception, the school has suffered financial difficulties. In recent years, it has been plagued with declining enrollment. Shortly before the Beck fundraiser, the university reported that its enrollment was half of what it had been the previous year, with only about 150 students. More recent money troubles have stemmed from ill-advised real estate deals in an effort to build a much larger campus. The high-profile endorsements from Beck and Romney did not do much to place the school on better footing. The gala itself, according to school officials, "failed to net any gains."
GWU has recently closed its doctorate program, and this spring announced that it was abandoning ambitious plans for the new campus. Its main building in Cedar City is for sale, and the school is now operating out of an office suite in Salt Lake City. Enrollment is down to a mere 60 students.
There are conflicting accounts as to how Romney came to endorse George Wythe. Shanon Brooks, a former GWU president and head of the committee that organized the 2009 gala, tells Mother Jones, "I believe that the video was secured via members of his family who had a connection with him." But Andrea Saul, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, says, "Glenn Beck asked Gov. Romney to introduce him, and the governor agreed to do it." By this telling, Romney, as he was eyeing his next presidential bid, endorsed a conspiracy-promoting school of iffy standing to score points with a conspiracy-minded conservative icon—and ended up making common cause with crackpot thinking shunned by the Mormon church and the National Review.
Mia Love speaks at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
When she spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, Mia Love, a GOP rising star who's vying to become the first black Republican woman elected to the House, wowed delegates with her parents' up-by-their-bootstraps tale. She said their story of coming to America from Haiti with $10 in their pockets formed the basis for her own belief in self-reliance and her staunch opposition to government handouts.
Love—mayor of the small town of Saratoga Springs, Utah—has been widely spotlighted as a pol who's going places in the GOP, and she's linked herself closely to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. Recently, she served as an official surrogate for Romney on a campaign swing through Nevada, and she MC'd a fundraiser for him in Utah last Tuesday. Though a child of immigrants, Love has embraced much of her party's tough stance on immigration. She has implied that she would back deporting the US-born children of illegal immigrants so as not to reward "bad behavior." Yet by Love's own account, she is what Republicans derisively call an "anchor baby"— someone born to immigrant parents specifically to game the immigration system and secure legal status for family members.
Last week, Mother Jonesraised questions about the story Utah GOP congressional candidate Mia Love tells on the campaign trail about her Haitian immigrant parents. She often highlights their tale of coming to the US with $10 in their pockets and making it in America without any help from the government. She has claimed they came here legally and thus, she and her parents are different from those other immigrants her party would like to see barred at the gate. Yet in 2011, Love described her birth in the US as "our family's ticket to America," because it allowed her parents to beat a deadline in the law and gain "citizenship." Her story suggested that she was what members of her party derisively call an "anchor baby."
I tried to confirm Love's story about her birth and whether it could have allowed her parents to gain citizenship, because her description conflicts with current immigration law. I interviewed a host of immigration lawyers and put the details Love had provided about her family's immigration story to federal officials at both agencies that have jurisdiction over immigration. None of them could find a specific provision in the law that matched the one Love described. After researching the subject, a spokeswoman for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service said that US policy since 1924 has been to bar minor children from petitioning for their parents' permanent residence. As a result, I suggested that Love's story might be inaccurate.
However, it turns out I was wrong on one count. There was a measure in place that would have allowed Love's birth to help her parents attain permanent resident status if they registered before 1977. The law, passed in 1976, was never codified, meaning that it was never made part of the US code, so someone looking in the US code books for the Immigration Nationality Act, of which it is part, wouldn't necessarily be able to find the provision. It often exists as a footnote in some versions of the code, according to Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer with Lane Powell in Alaska. (It's also described in this State Department manual.)
Forbes first reported on Friday that this particular law allowed residents of the Western Hemisphere to use a child born in the US to apply for resident visas. The Forbes story also suggests that despite her protestations, Love's parents were probably in the country illegally, at least for a while, after overstaying their visas—something that nearly half of all illegal immigrants in the US have done. Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, writes in Forbes:
In discussing the parents’ path to America with Margaret Stock, we both came to the conclusion that Mia Love’s parents likely came to the United States on tourist visas and then overstayed those visas for at least a few years. Stock says it’s possible Mia Love’s parents conscientiously filed regular extensions to those visas and that those extensions were all approved. More likely, Mia Love’s parents were in the country out of legal status and, it turned out, after Mia’s birth a provision of U.S. immigration law that would expire in a year may have helped them stay legally.
Since Mother Jones first raised these issues, Republicans have rallied to Love's side, taking issue with our use of the term "anchor baby" and claiming that her family's immigration story is irrelevant to her campaign. Michelle Malkin, who has said that "anchor babies" undermine national security and the integrity of citizenship, snarked on Twitchy,
Note the question mark and quotes around “anchor baby.” The Mother Jones writer isn’t saying Love is an “anchor baby” to undermine her huge lead; she’s just “asking questions” about “what Republicans derisively call an ‘anchor baby’.” You know, by suggesting her parents “gamed the immigration system” and raising questions about Love’s truthfulness...Note to Mother Jones’ readers: Love’s parents came to the United States as legal immigrants. Not that she had much say in the matter.
Utah Republican Party Chairman Thomas Wright told the Salt Lake Tribune that questions about Love's immigration history should be off limits:
[T]his line of questioning is inappropriate. I think for a candidate to have to speculate on her parents’ motive during her conception and birth is outside the scope of what questions are appropriate during a campaign. The fact is her parents are U.S. citizens and if people have questions about that, then they should take those questions to the government agency that granted them citizenship.
For a good part of his campaign, Mitt Romney has been dogged by questions about his taxes—everything from whether he's avoided paying them by investing offshore to how he managed to amass an individual retirement account (IRA) worth tens of millions more than any average person could invest in it. Romney has for the most part refused to answer substantive questions about anything related to his taxes, and he's only released two years worth of returns. He's also claimed that, as president, he'd close some tax loopholes to help balance the budget, while avoiding giving any specifics. The upcoming presidential debates provide a unique opportunity to pin Romney down on some of the questions he's been avoiding.
Here are 11 good questions to ask:
1. Your IRA retirement fund is worth as much as $100 million, but federal law limits IRA contributions to $30,000 a year. In light of this, how did you manage to sock away such a massive nest egg?
Mia Love speaks at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
Mia Love has made her Haitian immigrant family's bootstraps story the centerpiece of her campaign to become the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. But on Monday, Mother Jones raised some serious questions about the Utah congressional candidate's public statements about her family's immigration story, which she's used to justify a host of draconian budget proposals that range from eliminating the school lunch program to axing student loans.
In 2011, Love described herself to a Deseret News reporter as what some in her party like to derisively call an "anchor baby"—that is, someone who was born in the United States to immigrants hoping to gain legal citizenship. "My parents have always told me I was a miracle and our family's ticket to America," she told the paper.
The story has created a bit of a stir in Utah, where Love is trying to knock off six-term incumbent Rep. Jim Matheson, the state's only Democratic member of the House. Love has fired back and done a number of interviews criticizing our story. Yet she still has refused to answer the fairly basic questions Mother Jones has been putting to her campaign for more than a month, namely: How did her parents get to the United States, and how did they survive here on only $10 if they didn't get any government "handouts"?
Beyond the blustering on Benghazi and the budget sequester, there are many serious issues facing the nation. Climate change, gun violence, immigration reform, drone warfare, human rights—Mother Jones is dedicated to serious investigative reporting on all of these. But we need your help. We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our work is mostly funded by donations. Please donate 5 or 10 bucks to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund today to turbocharge our reporting and amplify our voice. Thanks!
