BACK TO THE ROOTS

Eliminationism has a long history in the radical wing of the GOP.

Abramoff's grand aims came early
Made powerhouse of GOP group
By Nina J. Easton, Globe Staff February 6, 2006

(VIA SCOUT PRIME)

WASHINGTON -- In 1981, a newly elected president was about to shift the nation rightward, and a 22-year-old Brandeis graduate named Jack Abramoff -- savoring his own victory as the newly elected chairman of the College Republicans -- was hatching plans to transform the nation's young people into stalwart Reaganites.

It was the start of a career that would roil Washington 25 years later, and a phase of Abramoff's life that provided signposts toward his later demise.

''Our job," Abramoff wrote, ''is to remove liberals ''from power permanently -- [from] student newspaper and radio stations, student governments, and academia.

''We are replacing these leftists with committed conservatives."

Abramoff's top lieutenants were two figures who would achieve their own prominence: Grover Norquist, the Harvard MBA who would become Washington's leading antitax activist, and Ralph Reed, who would build the Christian Coalition into a powerful GOP player in the 1990s. Both remained close to Abramoff, and both have been linked to his work on behalf of Indian tribes.

But in the eyes of the College Republicans, the Polish regime wasn't the only Moscow puppet -- so, too, were liberal student groups, the American media, leftist professors, and nuclear-freeze activists. Abramoff distributed on campuses 900 copies of a book called ''Target America," which posited that the Soviets had planted 4,000 journalist-agents in the American media to pursue a ''massive secret propaganda campaign," according to memos.

A training manual from the period, which Reed helped to write, described Ralph Nader's network of Public Interest Research Groups on campus as ''tyrannical" and ''radical." Abramoff's team accused the United States Student Association -- a 350-chapter liberal campus group that in 1982 protested Reagan's student aid cuts -- of being a ''pro-Soviet, pro-terrorist, Marxist-Leninist organization." The manual advised boycotting ''Marxist" professors, and soliciting support from alumni college donors to oust them.