Richard Mellon Scaife
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Richard Mellon Scaife is a billionaire heir to the Mellon family fortune made on oil, banking, and aluminum businesses. He was the chief financier behind the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" that spent most of the 1990s trying to get Bill Clinton out of the White House. A number of conspiracy theories surround Scaife, and he himself is given to whacked-out conspiracy theories.
In the 1960s and '70s, he donated to the campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon (some of the money for which ended up in a Watergate slush fund) and helped co-found the Heritage Foundation.
During the 1990s, he bankrolled a number of organizations and news outlets that attempted to dig up dirt on Clinton, including Accuracy in Media, American Spectator, Christopher Ruddy of Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (who ironically gave Clinton a positive review in a 2007 article[1]) and Judicial Watch, which filed a number of lawsuits against Clinton. These groups pushed a number of Clinton conspiracy theories, mostly surrounding the death of Vince Foster and allegations that Clinton had run a drug smuggling ring in Arkansas in collaboration with the CIA. A common moonbat conspiracy is that Scaife had intimate ties to Kenneth Starr and the two orchestrated the vast right-wing conspiracy in a smoke-filled room somewhere. Starr did in fact belong to a couple of Scaife-funded organizations including the Washington Legal Foundation, but there is no evidence the two met to work together against Clinton. In addition, it was Starr's investigation that ruled Foster's death a suicide while Scaife-backed propaganda organs continued to push the conspiracy theories. Another moonbat conspiracy is that Scaife put a hit on Steve Kangas, a Las Vegas-based investor in gambling operations and proprietor of a website called Liberalism Resurgent (which contained anti-Scaife material), who committed suicide in 1999.[2]
Scaife himself has an interest in intelligence operations and is prone to seeing "Reds under the bed" and some of his outlets like Accuracy in Media push Bircher-esque conspiracy theories about socialist and United Nations takeovers of the US. They are also big backers of global warming conspiracy theories and denialism.
In a notable exception to his usual rightward politics, he is pro-choice and donates to Planned Parenthood.
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[edit] See also
- Newsmax, now mostly owned by Christopher Ruddy
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Burnett, Thom. Conspiracy encyclopedia pp. 128-130 [1]
- Knight, Peter (ed.) Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. pp. 645-646 [2]
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Bill Clinton Gives Interview to Former Foe, New York Times
- ↑ Death Sparks Conspiracy Theory, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette