Gadflyer contributor Sarah Posner delivers a thorough investigation of the Council for National Policy (CNP), the little-known but high-powered conservative organization founded by Left Behind author Tim LaHaye in 1981. It’s been described by Donald Rumsfeld as “the heart of a great conservative movement”; by Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) as “the most influential gathering of conservatives in America”; and by its own executive director, Steve Baldwin, as a group that “controls everything in the world.” CNP’s membership roster (past and present), as Posner notes, reads like a “who’s who of the radical right,” including James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, Brent Bozell, Holland and Jeffrey Coors, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly and Oliver North. Posner wonders why the media’s been so silent about the Council. Besides a small controversy when George W. Bush spoke to the group during his presidential candidacy in 1999 and refused to make his remarks public, scant attention has been paid to the equally secret speeches given to the CNP by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, and deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liason, Timothy Goeglein (described last year by The New York Times as Bush’s liason to the Christian Right).