West Michigan Far Right Watch: GR Chamber of Commerce, the Acton Institute and the Great Lakes Education Project

In this week’s edition of West Michigan Far Right Watch, we look at 3 separate groups and what they are up to.

We begin with the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, which hosted another event with State Legislators. The GR Chamber of Commerce does this event throughout the year, since they are always pushing their own policy agenda and because they provide lots of campaign contributions to candidates or incumbents that will be on the upcoming 2024 ballot. 

In the picture above, you can see that it involves Kara Wood, the Executive Director of Grand Action 2.0, John Helmholt, with SeyferthPR, who is heading up the Destination Kent Committee, and Josh Lunger, the VP of government affairs for the Chamber.

The presentation at the recent Legislators Luncheon, by Wood, Lunger and Helmholt, was to present information to the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce members on the upcoming hotel tax ballot initiative, which will be on the August Primary. The Destination Kent Committee has already filed with the County Clerk as the entity that will be accepting campaign contributions to get the hotel tax increase passed in August, something I wrote about in early May.  The fact that Grand Action, SeyferthPR and the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce wants this ballot initiative to pass should be cause for concern from people, indeed it should be enough reason to not support the ballot initiative in August. These are the same people who crafted and endorsed the GR Chamber of Commerce ordinance proposal in late 2022, which would criminalize the unhoused, plus these groups also then endorsed the City of Grand Rapids ordinances that did criminalize the unhoused in 2023. 

The second example comes from a recent article that appeared on the Acton Institute’s website, entitled, Fighting for the Church in a Time of Crisis: The Barmen Declaration. 

Surprisingly, the article promotes the Confessing Church, which was a sector of Christian Churches in Germany that opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Acton article references the Barmen Theological Declaration and even mentions the German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as examples of what the Christian community should do to oppose and resist the Nazis. Some of you might be aware of the fact that Bonhoeffer was arrested for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler, but may not know about his larger role within the Confessing Church, which he wrote about and can be found in the book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers from Prison. Another excellent source on the Confessing Church was published locally by Eerdmans entitled, The Third Reich and the Christian Churches: A Documentary Account of Christian Resistance  and Complicity During the Nazi Era. 

I found myself agreeing with much of what was included in this Acton Institute article, but was confounded by the deep contradiction this article presented when put next to the overall ideological purpose of the far right think tank known as the Acton Institute. Most of what I have written about the Acton Institute over the past 30 years demonstrates that the Acton Institute would not have stood with the Confessing Church in Germany during the Nazi era, rather they would have complicit in the heinous crimes then, just as they do now by hating on the Movement for Black Lives, organized labor, LGBTQ justice, reproductive justice, as well as celebrating the economic system of Capitalism.

The last group I wanted to mention was the Betsy DeVos created group, the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP). In a recent post, GLEP announces a list of candidates they are endorsing because of their position on education, which aligns with the right wing, anti-Public Education framework that Betsy DeVos has been promoting for the past 4 decades.