This is the first in a series on Ken Cuccinelli’s extremist and/or crazy contributors. Today, we begin with Philip Zodhiates, who donated $1,000 to Cuccinelli on 9/11/13. Per the New York Times, Zodhiates – who “runs Response Unlimited, a Christian direct-mail company in Waynesboro, Va.” – was intimately involved in a highly-publicized “international parental kidnapping” involving a mother secretly transporting her daughter to Zodhiates’ Nicaraguan beach house. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Zodhiate’s organization, “Response Unlimited”:
…charges $100 for the rental of every 1,000 names of subscribers to the now-defunct Spotlight newspaper. Founded by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto, The Spotlight carried anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and wildly conspiracist articles interspersed with ads for Klan, neo-Nazi and related hate groups.
Wow. But wait, there’s more:
In March 2005, The New York Times reported that Response Unlimited had cut a deal with Bob Schindler, the father of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state who was dying after a court authorized removal of her feeding tube. In return for the list of people who had donated money to Schindler, Zodhiates’ firm agreed to send out an E-mail soliciting further donations for the Schindlers, who had battled Schiavo’s husband over whether or not to retain the feeding tube.
Many found the list deal, made even before Schiavo finally died two days after the Times article appeared on March 29, ghoulish…
And last but not least:
Other lists offered by Response Unlimited include donors to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a group described by President Bush as “vigilantes” that has sent armed civilians to the border to guard against illegal immigration; Gun Owners of America, whose founder Larry Pratt has written for anti-Semitic publications and who was ejected from Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign for alleged ties to white supremacists; and American Border Patrol, led by Glenn Spencer, whose vitriolic Web site has long specialized in pillorying Latinos and especially Mexicans.
Lovely, eh? Yet why is it not surprising that Zodhiates is a big supporter of his fellow extremist nutjob Ken Cuccinelli?