Democracies in Crisis: An Imperfect Storm —Byline Supplement's News Meeting with Anne Nelson and Josiah Mortimer

Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on our recent news meeting to discuss the 'bad faith' networks turning people into anti-democratic handmaidens.

Participating in the meeting were Heidi Siegmund Cuda, Shadow Network author Anne Nelson, Byline Times Chief Reporter Josiah Mortimer, Byline Times co-founder Peter Jukes and Byline Times Political Editor Adam Bienkov.

“These people don’t want government to work.”—Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network

The Election of Donald Trump

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Anne, you’re an award-winning journalist and author, and your book Shadow Network does a deep dive into the very cynical plot to weaponize swaths of religious voters. These are voters who historically didn't really vote, and historically were pretty apolitical, and essentially weaponize them to vote against democracy. Your book also informed the new film, Bad Faith. And it’s important to note you have written multiple historic books about the resistance to fascism in World War II, and it all ties together. But let's start with religious manipulation — how a group of essentially apolitical people became a weapon of democratic destruction.

Anne Nelson: My book goes back to the Reagan administration, when some disappointed Barry Goldwater supporters decided to take advantage of Reagan's popularity. And they founded a movement that would coordinate media operations with major donors from both the fossil fuels industries and what they call the ‘freshwater donors’ such as the DeVos family in Michigan and the Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin, and organize a kind of political machine of great sophistication. 

First of all, they had a very astute understanding of the weird workings of the Electoral College, which I think a lot of Americans, even public officials, don't fully understand. It's not remotely one man, one vote in this country. There's a rather antiquated system that doesn't make sense to anyone, and yet it hasn't gotten reformed. And if you tweak the machinery in one way or another, you can get results that have actually happened in the past where the popular vote goes for one presidential candidate, but the Electoral College goes for another. 

So that operation recently culminated in 2016 in the election of Donald Trump. And the way that they did this was looking at pockets of the votes in swing states that were previously unengaged, evangelical Christians who proved to be fairly easy to manipulate — partly because they responded to an authoritarian relationship with their pastors who could be recruited, partly because otherwise they were low information voters, and additionally limited by the collapse of a lot of local newspapers and professional journalism organizations in their communities. 

So all of this came together with the help of techniques developed, and really having a dress rehearsal in Great Britain, with Cambridge Analytica looking at how to manipulate data, and then pumping it out on cell phone apps and other means to reach rural low information voters with, shall we say, falsehoods. So Brexit was a lot of the same people, a lot of the same techniques, telling Britons that they would benefit with the National Health Service by leaving the EU, that there were hordes of Turks ready to invade Great Britain — all of these scare tactics that were based not on actual facts — but managed to get results that could then be parlayed into the American elections.

Peter Jukes: Cambridge Analytica was described by Andy Wigmore, who was the deputy leader of the official Leave campaign in the EU, as a Petri dish for Trump. And so you think that it was a successful petri dish? He's called himself Mr. Brexit Plus Plus, hasn't he? 

AN: Yes, and I’m talking about technical terms. I'm talking about the actual techniques and cell phone apps by the same developers, one of whom happened to have gone to a Russian Computer Science University. So I’m talking about real practical connections, not just philosophical affinity.

HSC: We all benefit from your work, thank you. I was telling the Byline team before we started that the fact that you're from Oklahoma, and then moved to New York, you witnessed in your lifetime this shift from where you didn’t know how people would vote just based on the church they attended. Can you speak on that phenomenon?

AN: President Jimmy Carter is a Southern Baptist, and a Democrat. And as of the 60s and 70s, a lot of the South was basically blue states trending to purple, as opposed to now when there are red states with tiny, tiny islands of blue. 

So there was this campaign very carefully organized to specifically target initially fundamentalist churches. So the Southern Baptist Church was selected by two fellows that I described in my book, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, who engaged in some dirty tricks in the 1970s and ‘80s to purge the Southern Baptists of all liberalizing influences — theologians, seminary professors, pastors, et cetera. And then once they realized this ambition, and were able to politicize this, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is large and very influential in the states and heavily woven into fossil fuel interests, they then shared these techniques and this approach with the fellow members of the Council for National Policy, a shadowy dark money umbrella organization. 

And what we've seen over the last 40 years is a really ruthless purge of the Republican Party. You have various people who would reach across the aisle and work with Democrats to solve common problems in the country, being opposed by this machine and driven out of public office. I mean, Jeff Flake of Arizona is just one example. There are many, many others. John McCain was persecuted by these people, John Boehner was driven out of his Speaker seat in ways that I described in Shadow Network, because these people don't want government to work. 

They want it to fail. And if it fails, that gives them the means and the argument to take it over and destroy vast areas of the federal bureaucracy, including social programs, public education, public libraries, public health service and other other services to the public, which, you know, because they are paid for with taxes, and these people are driven by plutocrats who don't want to pay taxes, they want to eliminate whatever they can and call it freedom. Freedom from public health, how about that?

HSC: Wow, and Anne, we have a UK audience, and a global audience right now looking at America in horror, because of the fact that Trump is a presidential candidate again and the media is treating him like a somewhat normal candidate. And of course, there's nothing normal about it. Can you explain how Trump can put out a God Made Trump and the why of it? Because I think that might help explain how we've come to this precipice.

AN: The way they played the so-called theology is, as of 2016, early in the year, they had a big problem because Trump as a reality television celebrity was winning all of these primaries, and the fundamentalists and radical right’s preferred candidates at that time were Ted Cruz and maybe Marco Rubio. But they realized that Trump was going to be the Republican candidate according to the primary process. And quite a few of them had been Never Trumpers. 

Trump was just a sinner in so many ways, in their book, and a man of no experience and little character. So they came up with this explanation that they saw as biblical, which was that King Cyrus of Persia was not Jewish, but he helped the Jews in their captivity. So he was not a man of God, he was an instrument of God. 

And this was kind of pumped out across their media systems. And in their churches — they minted these little fake gold coins. I actually have one, with a profile of Trump and Persian King Cyrus. So they grandfathered him into their religious thinking. And then tried to give him some scripts so he could function. But he didn't do very well with the scripts. 

There was one infamous interview where people said, ‘Well, what is your favorite part of the Bible, do you prefer the New Testament and the Old Testament, and he couldn't name anything in either one. He said, ‘Oh, I just, I just like it all’. So he really wasn't as good at following the script as Ronald Reagan was. But of course, Ronald Reagan had been a professional actor, so he did have a stronger background. 

So once Trump was grandfathered in as the nominee, there was a deal that was cut and recorded. I mean, it's fully documented where the fundamentals went to him and said, ‘Okay, you don't have any of the equipment to run a presidential campaign. You don't have a strategy. You don't have a war chest, you don't have a ground game. You don't have canvassers. We got all of that. So let's make a deal. We'll give you those elements, which will help you run an actual campaign. And here's what you're gonna give us. You're gonna have a religious council to advise you, that will be all fundamentalist Christians’. 

Now, Obama had a religious council, but it had Muslims and Jews and Christians and Protestants and Catholics. Trump's was all radical right-wing Protestant fundamentalist with a couple of exceptions who resigned pretty early on. 

Another element was that the organizations connected to the Council for National policy — the core groups — were going to give him a list of Supreme Court nominations. And he would choose Supreme Court justices from that list. And the list was dominated by the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and believe it or not, the National Rifle Association. 

They were one of the three groups that was entitled to choose a list of Supreme Court justices, as bizarre as that sounds. And after the first successful nomination, Trump gathered them all to the White House and had a photo op with these people, most of whom were from the Council for National Policy, saying, ‘Thank you for this successful list of nominees’. 

So in that regard, having had the Republicans in Congress block the Merrick Garland nomination under the Obama administration, they were able to stack a court in their favor. And of course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unfortunate decision not to resign in time for a replacement played into their strategy quite neatly. 

So they captured the court, but not just the Supreme Court. We have three levels of federal courts in the United States, and they have gone after the various district courts and courts of appeals and stacked them as well. So they've tilted some of these courts in their favor, but not all of them.