Shadow Network: The Anne Nelson Interview - Part I
Gaslit Nation is excited to welcome Anne Nelson, an expert on American right-wing aspiring autocrats who has been warning about the conditions that led to our present national crisis for our entire adult lives! Yes, you should have listened to Anne Nelson’s warnings earlier but it’s never too late to start. In this crash course in America’s secret history, Nelson describes a radical right-wing takeover that was decades in the making. She explains the nefarious financial and political alliances that arose during the Reagan administration and still guide the US today, the rise of the religious right over the past five decades, “shadow network” think tanks like the Council for National Policy, and the infusion of dark money in politics. She also describes the ineffective response of the Democratic Party to Republican extremists, the January 6 attack on America, and what steps we can take to preserve our democracy.
Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, and a lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist she covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1995, she became the director of the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting. Her 2009 book Red Orchestra describes the way media was used for both propaganda and resistance in Nazi Germany. She writes regularly for the Washington Spectator and you can read her work there.
Our weekly bonus episode, available to Patreon subscribers at the Truth-Teller level or higher, continues our discuss with Nelson where she takes the Gaslit Nation Self-Care Q&A. Gaslit Nation is on hiatus from our usual bonus Q&A episodes until June, but we will be back to answering your questions in July, so please keep them coming by joining on Patreon and letting us know what you want to discuss! Gaslit Nation is an independent podcast made possible by listener support – we could not make this show without you!
Download Transcript
[intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and of the upcoming book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, available for pre-order now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, a film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see so be sure to see it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa (00:00:48):
Welcome to our special spring series, Gaslit Nation Presents… Rising up from the Ashes: Cassandras and Other Experts on Rebuilding Democracy [harp SFX]. Our bonus episodes available to Patreon subscribers at the Truth-teller level and higher feature our esteemed guests taking the Gaslit Nation Self Care Q&A, so for fun ideas, sign up to hear that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Joining at this level also gives you access to hundreds of bonus episodes on topics in the news today. We'll be back with our regular episodes in July. If you're signed up any time between now and then at the Democracy Defender level or higher on Patreon—
Andrea Chalupa:
You’ll get special access to watch a live taping of Gaslit Nation over the summer. More details to come. This interview was recorded December 14th, 2021.
[begin interview]
Andrea Chalupa (01:43):
Today we are joined by the wonderful Anne Nelson, author of the must-read book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Anne Nelson is a lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist, she covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1995, she became the director of the International Program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting. After 2003, Nelson taught at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs, otherwise known as CIPA, where her classes and research explored how digital media can support the underserved populations of the world through public health education and culture. Nelson is a widely published author. Her 2009 book, Red Orchestra, describes the way media was used for both with propaganda and resistance in Nazi Germany. Nelson's play, The Guys, based on her experiences following the September 11th attacks, has been produced in all 50 states, 15 countries, and as a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver. It has been widely used to fund local fire departments and related causes such as trauma counseling and burn treatment centers. She writes regularly for the Washington Spectator and you can read her work there. Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Anne Nelson.
Anne Nelson (03:17):
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
Andrea Chalupa (03:19):
So we’ve wanted to have you on the show for some time because your book, Shadow Network, is one we know our audience would love. It is just such an empowering read—a disturbing read—and it helps piece together a lot of how we got here. So if anyone's wondering, How did we get here, this crisis point in American democracy? Well, read Shadow Network by Anne Nelson.
Anne Nelson (03:44):
It could make a highly selective Christmas present depending on which relatives you're shopping for.
Andrea Chalupa (03:48):
Right, exactly. A very passive aggressive gift possibly, but yes. No, but it is essential reading. So your book was refreshing, especially for me and Sarah because we cover this topic extensively and it's just so nice to have it laid out there and be reminded of so many things and piece together and fill in holes in other areas. So we appreciate all your tenacious work and research that went into Shadow Network. Now, I want to start by the big picture. By 2031 or so, minorities and Millennials and Gen Z will be a much bigger part of the electorate, of course, and that trend of greater diversity of the electorate will continue. Changing demographics have worried the radical right for decades. They've seen this coming and so they've developed and implemented a successful shadow network, a long game strategy that you've outlined in your book, that's paying off now, to the point where we may be two election cycles away from losing our democracy. Is that about right?
Anne Nelson (04:58):
Yeah, they have really gone deep into American history, and not just the role of slave owners in crafting our original founding documents, but also some ways that the pre-Civil War and the post-Civil War culture unfolded in terms of the South and the way that our system assigns disproportionate power to citizens of less populated states. You see it in the Senate, you see it in the electoral college. So what these people did was look at the national population and say, “We're not gonna be winning the popular vote”—they haven't for some time—”but we can go into the mechanics of the system, under the hood, and game the system so that by controlling states with less population but more influence in these other circles, we can take over the entire system.” So they’re, I would say, over halfway done with that process.
Andrea Chalupa (05:59):
And explain the historical origin and evolution of the current, for lack of a better word, holy war by the radical right, because they've seen the writing on the wall and what they are driven to protect in their minds is this white Christian patriarchy. And it's across Christian religions that they've come together. So could you talk about the history?
Anne Nelson (06:28):
Yeah, and I tend to be a little cynical about that because in spending, you know, most of the last five years staring at these organizations and this map, what I see is the heavy influence of the fossil fuels industries. And again, they were on the losing side of history, too. And they realized that the votes that they could influence were votes of evangelical Christians who maybe had been Dixiecrats in the past, maybe were unengaged. So there was this population, this latent population in a number of critical states that they wanted to activate. So you bring in the religious right, and as of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act, there were very prominent televangelists like Jerry Falwell, like Pat Robertson and others, who had made large fortunes by basically dunning little old ladies in their TV audiences for their money and also in their educational enterprises.
Anne Nelson (07:32):
These are businessmen. And when the government—the federal government—began to enforce integration, they set up their own schools, which were all white. They were called Christian, although I would question whether an actual Christian would demand an all white school, but that's another subject. And these were, again, serious revenue centers for them. It included universities like Liberty University, which were very large enterprises. So at a certain point, the federal government and the IRS said, “No, if you're going to have a segregated academy, then you can't have tax exempt status. That violates IRS regulations.” And they started looking for champions who would represent their interests in the political sphere. They first found Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was not of their tribe. He was not an evangelical Christian. He drank and smoked and divorced and all that, but they cut a deal.
Anne Nelson (08:40):
And in 1981, celebrating Reagan's victory, a group of these fundamentalists and televangelists and their fossil fuel allies got together and founded something called the Council for National Policy. They chose the most boring name they could find intentionally. They held secret meetings with secret membership that brought together big dollar donors—and we're talking about the Devos family from Texas, Foster Freiss, the financier from Wyoming—and they brought in strategists like Richard Viguerie, and then they had their own pollsters like George Barna, and their own media people like the owners of Salem Broadcast Network, which has mushroomed into this multi-platform, very large media organization that very few people on the coast have heard of. Then you combine that with their boots on the ground organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony List who go door-to-door during campaigns, telling people how to vote. And they do it advised by top strategists, informed by data generated by Koch Brothers enterprises and it's a truly sophisticated operation. There is nothing that I have ever found that is remotely parallel on the Democrat side.
Sarah Kendzior (10:06):
And why do you think that is? Why have the Democrats, especially 40 years onto this, where all of these various right-wing groups have emerged, they've been successful at hijacking democracy, moving the country toward a one-party state, eroding rights, it's been very in our face, especially since Trump. Why did they not create any kind of apparatus in response?
Anne Nelson (10:29):
I have a couple of thoughts about that. Recently, I've been sought after by former members of Congress and former White House officials who said, “Oh, we kind of knew it was there, but we didn't take them seriously.”
Sarah Kendzior (10:45):
Well, isn't that interesting? Sorry. [laughs]
Anne Nelson (10:47):
It's so interesting. I have to say that until this recent research by a very small number of people that has gotten into their records and their membership lists and videos of their meetings, it has been hard to decipher what they've been doing and how they've been doing it. And I have to say that the internet made my book possible. I can't imagine having researched it otherwise. But we go deeper than this, so this is where, Sarah, I think my work has a dialogue with yours because I keep hearing people talk about generic polling—”Oh, public opinion supports the Democrats on all these policies, etc., etc.—and it's like, yeah, the population centers in major urban areas like Chicago and the coasts are increasingly the population centers of the country. And if we had a system that relied on the popular vote, you'd be fine. But that is not the system we've ever had.
Anne Nelson (11:51):
We've always had an electoral college, we've always had a Senate, and that has left these loopholes and these vulnerabilities in the electoral system that the Democrats—and frankly, the national news media—have utterly disregarded and that these strategists have figured out how to exploit. So I spend half of my breath telling people that they really need to think about Arizona. They really need to think about North Carolina, even though in many cases, they've never been to these places and probably can't find it on a map. It's part of the divide that we have in this country and it irritates me because it's also a cultural divide. A lot of the people in the Democratic party and the national news media don't really feel they need to tune into these parts of the country and the neglect shows.
Andrea Chalupa (12:41):
I think they do in the sense that they fetishize it. Does that make sense? Especially on Morning Joe, they talk about [mocking voice] “The men and women of Kenosha, Wisconsin being real Americans” and it's actually created quite, I think the media itself has created a stigma that people like the coastal elites…And the Republican Party does this as well and Sarah and I have been accused of being coastal elites ourselves.
Sarah Kendzior:
The coast of the Mississippi river. <laugh>
Andrea Chalupa:
Right, but we're not “real Americans”. Like the Republican Party, many in the media and mainstream media pit Americans against each other based on geography, like “who's the real American and who isn't?”
Sarah Kendzior:
But I think it's true that the Democrats really don't have interest in this part of the country, even in a state like Missouri, where you've got literally half the population in two big, fairly liberal cities; St. Louis, Kansas City. You know, I know folks working in the Democratic Party in Missouri and they're very frustrated with the national Democratic apparatus because they feel like they're not being seen, they're not being heard. And they keep saying, “Don't fall for these stereotypes. Don't fall for either the fetishization—where it's like we're all hardscrabble “real Americans”—and don't fall for this idea that we're all a bunch of Trump worshiping elderly folks sitting in a diner, talking to a New York Times reporter about our MAGA hat collection. It's always some sort of ridiculous stereotype and it really is frustrating because I feel like there are commonalities throughout the entire country.
Sarah Kendzior (14:22):
Anne, you were talking about how you didn't feel like you were heard on some of these issues. One other thing I feel like I'm noticing a pattern here is we've got a lot of female journalists who are following the money in America, following the dark dirty money. You have Jane Mayer, Nancy McClean, we have me and my book, Hiding in Plain Sight. Naomi Klein. We have your book with Shadow Network. All of it is tracing back to about the same decades and it's starting in the ‘80s. Obviously things precipitated and came before, but it really takes off after Reagan. You see the same names over and over. It's like all these interlocking pieces of a puzzle, and they're all written by women. And I don't know, I mean, maybe it's a coincidence, but I just keep thinking, If men had written these books, would they be treated differently? Or, Would a man write this book? Or, Would a man want so badly to be in that little insular club that they wouldn't write that book? And this is not to dis the few men who do this kind of work because there are good men out there doing it, but sorry, that was a bit of a rant.
Anne Nelson (15:20):
I think it takes something of a maverick mentality-
Sarah Kendzior (15:23):
Yeah, I think so
Anne Nelson (15:24):
-to keep up all the data and then walk around it and take a different perspective on it. And frankly, I noticed this when I was a journalist in El Salvador and I was a very young freelancer but I hung out with the New York Times and Washington Post reporters, and the worst thing that either one of them could do was to get a scoop because if it departed too much from the master narrative that was being circulated in Washington, their career was in danger. So in terms of going out and trying to do the most groundbreaking reporting, there was actually an advantage to not being in the in club.
Sarah Kendzior (16:06):
I definitely think so. I mean, that's really interesting. So they felt like getting a scoop—which is their job, you know, identifying the roots of corruption or things that are affecting the American people—that's a negative quality in their view?
Anne Nelson (16:22):
It's dangerous. So, for example, there was a major massacre in the early 1980s in El Salvador, El Mozote, where some 900 villagers—largely children and old people—were massacred by the Salvador forces, which were being supported by the US administration. And the reporters felt they had to go together and report it at the same time and publish it at the same time, and even then the reporters involved were basically punished by the news culture and really lost a lot of ground in their careers because the administration didn't want to hear about massacres. It wasn't convenient. I think professional news media is incredibly important. It's critical to our democracy. I think local newspapers and reporting are extremely critical to our democracy, but I also think that you need some of us gadflies on the side who are willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.
Sarah Kendzior (17:25):
Yeah. I agree. I mean, we've seen, especially in recent years, what was labeled as the fringes, they are pulled to the center. And they already were the center all along. I mean, that's what Shadow Network describes. That's what a lot of these books describe is that they're never as peripheral as they thought. And I think that what it takes to kind of break all this down is just a different fringe or people who don't want access journalism, people who don't necessarily care if they're accepted or liked or whatever. You want the truth and you'll speak the truth to power. So I'm really glad you're doing that. Andrea had like 3,000 questions, so I wanna make sure she gets them in <laugh>. So Andrea, do you want to pick up from here?
Anne Nelson:
[laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, I want to talk about, obviously, the Far Rights masterful organization because I think you're right, there's nothing like this on the Democratic side and it's mind boggling why not. What's really interesting is how very early on, certain elements of the Far Right were looking at the successes of the Left, like the New Deal, and emulating some of those strategies for building their own movement decades ago that has since been paying off. So obviously my question is about the Council for National Policy. That's really what we're talking about when we talk about a shadow network. It’s one of their successful operations. What is the Council for National Policy? Where did it come from? And how does it operate?
Anne Nelson (19:01):
As I mentioned earlier, they gathered in 1981 after Reagan won the election with their considerable help mobilizing evangelical voters in the South. That was a big part of the so-called “Southern Strategy”. And so they said, “Okay, we've had this win. How do we make this a permanent movement?” So three strategists who were quite important were Richard Viguerie who invented basically mass mailing for political fundraising and then segued that into the use of social media. And Paul Weyrich, who was an architect. Paul Weyrich said, “It looks like the liberals have control of the national news media and Hollywood entertainment and everything else, the universities, and what we have to do is we can't really contest them so we have to set up our own parallel system.” So low and behold, they set up their own parallel system of media.
Anne Nelson (20:06):
I can't call it news media because it's not journalism. It's unidirectional advertising messaging that broadcasts at the radical rights position from an utterly one-sided, unreported point of view. But for the uninitiated, it looks like news coverage. You know, they have anchor people who sit behind desks with chyrons, so if you look at it, it looks like CBS. But it's not because they don't do actual reporting. They organized this news media and religious education system and knew, because of their strategic thinking, which states they needed to work in order to tip this balance. So what a lot of people don't understand is that over the last 20 years or so, the Republican Party has really paid a lot of attention to taking over state houses. They now control 30 of the country’s state houses and they control more states in the governorship and the legislature—by far—than the Democrats.
Anne Nelson (21:16):
So this gives them greater weight in terms of passing state laws and gerrymandering, which has been happening at pace. And again, the advantage that the Council for National Policy brings to it is that they have kind of a gathering of the clans several times a year—two or three times a year—at opulent resorts and the big donors come in (like the DeVos family and the Bradley Foundation from Wisconsin) and they work out a game plan. They get the strategy, they get the polling, they get the media lined up and they get the ground troops committed. So, for example, when Claire McCaskill was running for Senate last time in Missouri, you've got the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony List running this massive voter contact project in parallel to what the Republican Party was already doing. So, it was like redoubling their forces against these debilitated forces of the Democrats in these states (the so-called flyover) and it gives them a competitive advantage especially with everything else that they can marshal through this highly coordinated networking through the Council.
Andrea Chalupa (22:33):
What's interesting is that when they started off…. In your book, you write how the Democrats…. Back then it was a slightly different Democratic Party, but the Democrats tended to have a number of state governments under its control. And so the Far Right saw this and they decided to fire back, as you said, by taking over state governments and they did this by launching ALEC. So could you describe what ALEC is, what it does, how it operates and how it ties together with the CNP?
Anne Nelson (23:11):
Yeah. And as you mentioned earlier, Paul Weyrick, one of the prime architects of this, looked at the Democratic coalitions, the way they worked in 1960s. He actually went to the meetings to observe them. At that point, you had this generational to the New Deal coalition. You had trade trade unions. You had people from the Civil Rights movement, you had really tight-knit organizations. And this was a benefit in many states, both from a fundraising possibility but also getting out the vote, organizing people to do canvassing, etc. And the Democrats’ organization suffered a kind of hardening of the arteries. Part of it was, well, Reagan declared war on American trade unions and trade union membership has plummeted since the 1960s in the United States. So you've lost a lot of the fire power of those organizations.
Anne Nelson (24:16):
You had the Devos family really pounding away at the so-called right to work laws, which decimated the trade unions in Michigan. And the same thing with Council for National Policy member Scott Walker in Wisconsin. So every time you kneecap the trade unions in a state, the Democratic Party loses capacity. Now what stunned me was when I did a book talk in 2019 in Wisconsin, I had people in the Q&A say, “Well, we did canvassing for the Democrats in 2016 and the DNC didn't even get us literature to hand out at the doors.” Right? That's like campaigning 101. And so you went through this period where at the same time the Council for National Policy was networking and enlisting churches and pastors and boots on the ground, the Democrats, I feel, were playing more to a national audience than tending their garden in these swing states. And they lost Wisconsin in 2016, The people in Wisconsin were not overly surprised, but apparently it came as a shock to the national Democrats.
Andrea Chalupa (25:36):
Could you talk a little bit about the different religions, because I know you'd mentioned earlier in this conversation that Big Oil is behind a lot of this, obviously. Certainly we've seen that with how Joe Manchin tries to frame himself as Man of the People, but then he is in the pocket of Exxon lobbyists, according to those lobbyists, and he's driving around in a Maserati and all that. But there is a genuine religious culture tied up in this and what's really interesting in your book is how you talk about how religions/churches that were at war with each other for generations finally decided to work together towards this cause of a far-right political takeover of our democracy. Could you talk about that history and how that all came to be? And what is the fruit of all that labor, that operation?
Anne Nelson (26:34):
Sure. You know, a lot of the Council for National Policy roots begin with the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptists are a very specific group and they split off from the American Baptists precisely before the Civil War in order to defend slavery, even before the war. So they have this history and they provided a lot of the chaplains for the Confederate army. It's much part of their legacy. They were quite interested in preserving many aspects of Southern culture and they were really very much present at the creation, in Texas in particular, of the Council National Policy and this general movement. And one thing that's really important to understand about this movement is that it is like a virus. It moves into the host and it destroys moderates. So the fundamentalist absolutists went into the Southern Baptist Convention and purged moderate Baptists. At that time around, you know, in the 1970s, the Baptists were more moderate on abortion than they are now, but they went through and systematically purged pastors and educators and people in congregations who had leadership roles in order to make it far more conservative than it was before. Then they moved into the Republican Party.
Anne Nelson (28:11):
And for the last 40 years, they've been doing that to moderate Republicans as well. And you can look at the trail of the Jeff Flakes and others who have just been marginalized and expelled because they won't sign onto these extremist policies. So, it grew out from the Southern Baptist into other portions of American Protestantism. Many of them are not very well understood from a political point of view. The Pentecostals have provided a very fertile field for their recruitment. They've really promoted a distorted notion of abortion policy and used that to promote themselves in different religious areas. Right now, Steve Bannon, who was a member of the Council for National Policy, is making a full court press, into the areas of conservative Catholics. And so they pull in these groups. And one of their contemporary strategists is Ralph Reed who will periodically make these speeches saying, “This is what we're going to do. We're gonna go after the evangelicals and then next year we'll go to the Catholics and we'll just fold them all into the movement”, even though they rely heavily on absolutely false information in order to build them into a base.
Sarah Kendzior (29:36):
One of the things I'm wondering about is that there's this apocalyptic rhetoric which you see, I think, foremost I guess in Evangelical communities, but also in Catholic communities, sometimes in Jewish communities, and I feel like it feeds into the climate change crisis. And I was just wondering since you brought up fossil fuels before, it made me think of Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who at his confirmation hearing, they were asking him basically about climate change and environmental protection actions, and he said—and this is a quote—”I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. And so therefore, why protect anything?” Like, well, let it all go to hell. I always wonder, you know, is this a cynical move where they're justifying plutocracy and fossil fuel corporate greed by saying, “Well, hey guys, the Apocalypse is coming, so why bother?” or do they really believe that the Apocalypse is at hand and therefore these policies sort of help accelerate it and maybe bring the Rapture closer than they thought it was before?
Anne Nelson (30:49):
Yeah. Well, in my book footnotes, there’s a speech from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking about the Rapture
Sarah Kendzior (30:56):
Mmmhmm[affirmative] Rapture fiend.
Anne Nelson (30:58):
Yeah, and a lot of analysts have looked at their policies towards Israel and seen the suggestion that they're trying to fulfill some kind of biblical prophecy about Israel, pre-rapture, through their foreign policy. I have spent so much energy trying to figure out what's going on in their minds, as well as their hearts, and I can't say I've entirely succeeded. [laughs] You know, some of this stuff… Do they believe it? I don’t know.
Sarah Kendzior (31:33):
It's such a weird thing because it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think that the signs that the end is near are fires and floods, and I guess political things like the creation of the state of Israel and stuff, but then you do them, like if Exxon is doing them, if Exxon is heralding the apocalypse, then does it become like a holy arbiter? Or is it just a horrible fossil fuel company that they're using for it? I go back and forth too, especially with people like Pompeo. It's scary though. It's scary to have people in positions of power who are structuring foreign policy around the Rapture. That's just generally not a good idea. [laughs]
Anne Nelson (32:16):
I agree with that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Going out on a limb there.
Anne Nelson:
[laughs] Yeah. Let's not base our foreign policy on the Rapture, okay. But I also think back to my time in Latin America and this whole notion of the gated community, which you know, is very common in places like Florida. You create these walled—literal walled—gardens, right? Where the wealthy live opulent lives and they have extensive defenses to keep the hoi polloi from entering in and tearing it down. And I have to say that that's what I think is their actual vision of society, that they create their gated communities on a massive scale. And even the people they convince to vote for them are gonna be the losers who are locked out, right? And have nots. And so their real trick is—and I feel a lot of sympathy for these people, I really do—it's getting the people I grew up with in Oklahoma who are making $30,000 a year and struggling, and their kids go to deficient schools and they live near waste dumps, and somehow they convince them that first trimester abortion is what they should vote about at the expense of everything else that is immediately about their daily lives and their children's welfare. They have figured out how to do that. So you have to hand it to them in terms of sheer chutzpah, yeah?.
Sarah Kendzior (34:01):
Yeah, and they've been like that throughout COVID too. I remember initially people were like, “Oh, Trump is gonna let the blue cities die and preserve his base.” I'm like, He's not gonna help his base. He doesn't care if his base dies. None of these elite guys care if poor Republican voters die, especially in states like mine they think they already have on lock, you know, through voter suppression and whatnot. So, yeah, I'm glad you raised that point.
Anne Nelson (34:29):
You can use that gated community metaphor for everything that's going on in our society, right? The people with the money have the best medical care in the world. For everybody else, the life expectancy is dropping. Maternal mortality, all of these figures in the United States are shameful, except that if you're at the top, it's the best in the world. So that's their vision of society and they actively reject the idea of a common good, of social welfare, and it's up to anybody else to stop them.
Sarah Kendzior (35:07):
Well, how can we stop them?
Anne Nelson (35:09):
[laugh] Oh, these are the easy questions today.
Sarah Kendzior (35:12):
We want a quick one liner we can just post on Twitter, it'll be all set. But, you know, what are things that different folks can do? I guess ordinary citizens, people that are elected or appointed officials. Everyone's got their own kind of avenue of power/influence and it's different for everybody. What are some things that, I guess, should be done, I should say?
Anne Nelson (35:34):
Well, first and foremost, educate yourself about the electoral map. I had this moment of truth at a conference at Columbia, where I've taught for a long time, and they were talking about Indivisible, this organization that works for democratic reform. And they said, “Oh, and there are…”, you know, and they named this number, like scores of individual chapters on the Upper West Side of New York City. And I'm like, Well, that's hilarious because that is the most Democratic district in the country. Anyway… Again, the focus is so urban and that means that the focus of the messaging tends to be about urban liberal concerns. And the fact of the matter is that there are seven states next year that will determine the Congress and to some extent the governorships. They are Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
Anne Nelson (36:49):
You look at that list and you say, in some of those states, Biden won by 10,000 votes, less than 1%. And it's gonna be a tough race next year. So if you are politically motivated and you happen to live on the coast, and you live in an area with a large margin one way or the other, you're wasting your time focusing on those areas. New York is gonna go Democrat, no matter what. Nebraska's gonna go Republican, no matter what. These other states will determine the future of the Congress. And there's a special note here because if the Republicans take Congress, then they can continue to pass various gerrymandering provisions, but they'll also be in a position to enforce something called the Independent State Legislature Doctrine. It turns out that if you look carefully in the Constitution, the voters in a presidential election who select the electors to represent their state don't have the last say. If you have Republican legislators in these state houses who challenge the vote, whether it's on spurious grounds or otherwise, they have the power to select their own electors.
Anne Nelson (38:17):
So you could have a scenario where, first of all, no matter who votes for whom for president, these 30 Republican state legislatures could choose their own Republican electors to go and select their candidate as president 2024. Another option which is quite interesting to ponder is that it turns out that the Speaker of the House doesn't have to be an elected official of any kind. So if you have a Republican Congress and they decide in 2024 that they want to appoint Donald Trump as Speaker of the House, they could do that. And then he would be third in line to the presidency again. Or some other candidate of their choice. I don't think we should get overly focused on Trump. So, again, these are the mechanics of our political system. They're not very democratic, but they're what we've got. And I have to plead guilty: for years and years, I was analyzing political systems in other countries and somewhat neglecting my own. And when you stare under the hood, you say, How did this happen and why did it last? But it's not gonna change by next year and it's probably not gonna change by 2024. So everybody needs to thoroughly understand it, educate themselves, and then figure out where their gifts can be applied.
Andrea Chalupa (39:40):
Wow. Okay. So, a lot to take in here.
Anne Nelson:
[laughs] Sorry.
Andrea Chalupa:
No, I love it. I love it. It's nice. I feel like I'm actually in the audience listening to Gaslit Nation for once and I appreciate it. So they want their gated communities. They see a future where they will continue to be—will be—cloistered. What is it that they ultimately want for society? They seem to rally around abortion, as you mentioned, but what to them is an ideal society?
Anne Nelson (40:10):
Well, first of all, they're very anti-taxation and they're also very anti any form of regulation. So they would like the taxes reduced as close to nothing as possible for them and they would like to do away with the social programs that taxes support. So people in the Council for National Policy have fully advocated for the abolition of the Department of Education, for example. They're anti-public schools, they're very anti-public school teachers, and they also wanted to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency because we can rely on fossil fuel corporations to protect our environment, they would argue, and so on. So it's really a reversal of the reforms that our political system has carried out, not just since the New Deal. We're also going back to the Trustbusters and Teddy Roosevelt, right? They want to roll it all the way back to the 19th century in terms of its structure and its social relationships.
Andrea Chalupa (41:18):
And what do they want for the social relationships? Is the CNP a traditional family movement where they want women in the home, birthing as many babies as possible? What does the social world look like? Segregation?
Anne Nelson (41:34):
Well, I've tried to be as analytical about that as possible because, you know, they have added in influential women over the years. Phyllis Schlafly was one of the original members of the Council for National Policy and her organization is still a core member, so you have female leaders. You also have African-American leaders; Martin Luther King's niece, Alveda King, is a member. They're making a big play for members of African-American and Hispanic church communities. So it's not so-called Black and white, as you might think. But in terms of their vision of society, it is patriarchal. It is very authoritarian. And a lot of the leadership have been brought up in the notion that they are chosen by God. It's kind of this long term distortion of some of the Calvinistic theology from the 16th century.
Anne Nelson (42:47):
They've been chosen by God, they've been saved, and therefore they should have dominion over the rest of us. And there is actually a very strong current within the Council for National Policy of something called dominionism. It's taken from a verse in Genesis that says “You shall have dominion over the birds in the air and the beasts of the sea and the fishes in the water.” Basically, the idea is that Earth is there for you to exploit and the population is there to serve you because you are delivering the wishes of God. So other religions don't do very well in this system. I've sat 20 feet away from one of their popular pastors who called Judaism an “inferior system of belief”. Their former president, Tony Perkins, has said that “Islam is not a religion that should be defended by the Constitution,” etc., etc. Not only that, their version of Protestantism is their code and they argue that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation by their definition, and therefore their version of Christianity should be imposed on everyone else in the public sphere. So… there we are.
Andrea Chalupa(44:16):
Alright!
Anne Nelson:
[laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
So in your book, you talk about civil rights and all the grassroots and legal challenges to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement awakening in them a backlash; being antisemitic, being racist and then giving birth to segregation academies in the South in response to desegregation and so forth. But since then, they've opened up their movement to non-white communities as long as those non-white communities share their authoritarian dominionist traditional family values outlook on life and the future.
Anne Nelson (45:04):
I personally think they're getting used.
Andrea Chalupa (45:08):
You think the non-white members and leaders are being used by the broader CNP organizers?
Anne Nelson (45:17):
Yeah, I do. It's not up to me to speak for them, but there is what I see as tokenism going on there. And the other as aspect of it is that if you're siphoning off these African American pastors and these other figures to make the case for an organization that wants to radically cut back on the services and the support that are available for African American families, cut back on education, cut back on healthcare, I find that tragic. Again, it's putting this false representation of abortion policy on a pedestal to the detriment of everything else that affects their daily life. To be specific, what their propaganda pumps out is that Democrats support “abortion on demand up to the day of birth”, right?
Anne Nelson (46:25):
That's the terminology they use in their listservs, in their publications, in their speeches. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have both used the term “birthday abortions”. And this is just patently false, the idea that a woman who's nine months pregnant with a healthy baby can walk into a clinic and say, “Oops, changed my mind.” That doesn't happen. It's not legal anywhere. I've never heard of anyone who’s supported it, but they send out these mailings and, Lord help me, I'm on the mailing list so you get these pink cheeked healthy babies, and it says, “Democrats wanna execute this baby,” right? And they're not making any reference to women's health. They're not making any reference to the idea of stages of pregnancy. They're just creating this propaganda. And one point that I make in the book quite emphatically is that as you've had this big die off in local newspapers in these states, people do not have the same information culture they used to when I was growing up. So that makes them much more susceptible to this disinformation without correction.
[outro theme music]
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Oil Change International, an advocacy group supported with the generous donation from the Greta Thunberg Foundation that exposes the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to help support Ukraine by donating to Razom for Ukraine at razomforukraine.org. We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the Palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at theorangutangproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon. It keeps us going.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher—oh, and by the way, if you don’t hear your name on this list and you’ve signed up, we’re going to say your name starting in July and it keep it going for how long you’ve donated, FYI. So, we’d like to thank… [Patreon supporter list]