The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson Anne-nelson.com In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today. In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading Anne Nelson is an award-winning author and playwright who has written extensively about human rights and the defiance of totalitarian regimes. Her most recent work is "Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right." Her previous book, "Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris", a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, was published in eight countries. "Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler" (2009) was named Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of "Murder Under Two Flags: The US, Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up." Her play "The Guys," which premiered in 2001 with Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, has been produced in all 50 states and 15 countries. Her screenplay of "The Guys" was produced as a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. Her play "Savages," an exploration of military occupation, was described by the New Yorker as a work of "lacerating beauty." Nelson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and she has appeared on CBS "Sunday Morning" and The PBS "Newshour," as well as the BBC, CBC and NPR. She has received the Livingston Award for International Journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Bellagio Fellowship. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a research fellow at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs in New York City. Nelson lectures frequently on human rights, authoritarian regimes, and the role of the media. She is represented by Ethan Bassoff of the Ross Yoon Agency, and Authors Unbound speaker agency.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube to watch a live version of this video or record recorded version, I should say, at youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. You can also, of course, share the show with your friends, neighbors, relatives at the CVPN or chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com. You can also follow me on Goodreads at goodreads.com. Chris Voss, you can just search for me there.

We actually have a new book club that we're establishing on there on the Chris Voss Show. You can join the group and community and everything. We're going to give away some books and do all that fun stuff. You can also see the newest place we are in with syndication, Amazon Music. We got a special invite to join those folks, so you can search for the show and listen on Amazon Music if you like. We've got a great guest on the show, and she blew my mind with what she has written here, a lot of it in the same veins we've been talking about. Her book is called Shadow Network, Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

Her name is Ann Nelson. Welcome to the show, Ann. How are you? I'm doing pretty well Ann Nelson. Welcome to the show, Ann. How are you? I'm doing pretty well, Chris. Thank you. Awesome, Sus. And I'm glad to have you on because we've had a pretty lengthy discussion with a lot of authors coming on

where we've been talking a little bit about Betsy DeVos and a little bit about the right white nationalists and things of that nature. But you really bring it home. So give us your plugs on what your book, on where to find you and your book. Sure.

Well, the book is called Shadow Network, as you said, and what it's really talking about is how there's been this four decades of construction of a political machine, really, that has been underway. And it's not really been visible to most of our political and journalistic culture, partly because it is based on money that is not on the East or West Coast. So the most interesting and important thing about Betsy DeVos is her family. She's connected to a $6 billion with a B dollar fortune from the Amway company in Michigan. And that's what she married into.

And then her own family is also a billion dollar family. And they've been involved in, in politics for, for many, many years, including through an organization called the Council for National Policy, which is the organization I focus the book on. I got a chance to, as I was listening to some of your speaking, I got a chance to Google that and just, it's insidious and it spiders through a lot of different other organizations and stuff, doesn't it? It's a coordinating body. And it's very intentionally kept a very low profile for many years. They've managed to get tax-exempt status from the IRS as a kind of public-spirited charity.

But they haven't fulfilled the requirements of that status because rather than serving a public information purpose, they, they have been secretive. They hold their meetings in secret. Their membership has been secret. And I've managed to get membership roles to see who is actually a member. But in the meantime,

they coordinate political strategists and they have their own empire, and they're very active in swing states. And I think that they've really been a shadow operation behind the public face of our political life. These guys are like the white nationalist Christian Illuminati, just seems the way it's set up. Is that a good way to describe it, maybe? Well, I think they've got two big purposes. And the more overt purpose is to force the rest of the American population to live under the rules of Christian fundamentalists. So they want to roll back abortion for everyone even in extreme cases you know like a 12 year old who's raped they they want to bar abortion under extreme cases um they they are very

anti-lgbt and they would like to roll back those rights they're all about suppression of voting for minorities so they have a kind of white protestant vision of america that they think is the golden past that they want to bring back but the other part that we cannot forget is the economic component because part of their vision of the future is that you get rid of corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthiest 1%. And that will allow you to eliminate not just welfare, not just aid to dependent children and food stamps, but also Social Security and Medicare. Wow. So it's just a, and you can kind of see their operations

in the response to COVID, right? The idea is culling the herd and whoever isn't part of their club can be roadkill. It's quite terrifying. And it's been especially interesting, you know, when I wrote the book, some journalists would say, well, if they're that important, why haven't I heard of them? And I said, well, that's quite intentional on their part. Well, lo and behold, Trump's big policy speech on the eve of the Republican National Convention was to the Council for National Policy. That was not an accident. These guys go sell their souls to these people.

And they handpick them. Yeah, and they feel, feel again that they are god's chosen and that god wants them to impose their will on everyone else which is run so counter to the ideal of american democracy yeah it's quite extraordinary and and then one of the other things betsy wants to do is basically overthrow our public schools, correct? Yes, they think that public schools teach children dangerous ideas like evolution and multiculturalism. So they really don't want – and in fact, the Council for National Policy was born of a movement in reaction to integration of public schools. Wow. So they founded what they called Christian Academies, which also happened to be all white.

Yeah. And then they wanted tax exemption for them. And so this was their whole entry into the policy realm. And what people don't realize is Betsy DeVos is in there sabotaging our public school system. They even talked a little bit during the recent crisis of the coronavirus of like when school started, they're like, well, we need to make vouchers. And, you know, she was on TV going, well, private schools like the ones we run are much more safer and we should have vouchers. You know, you could see the whole movement of what was going on there. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies their group as a hate group.

Is that correct? Well, they identify affiliates, certainly, as hate groups. And having listened to a lot of their radio broadcasts, I can see why. There's one component called the American Family Association out of Tupelo, Mississippi. And I've listened to their broadcasters say that Hillary Clinton was a demon. Well, we all know that. Yeah, but as I always say, how do you fact check that, right? Where do you go? You look for a tail, I think.

I can always see the tail moving in the – no, I'm just kidding. No, and Beto O'Rourke is the son of Satan, et cetera. And, you know, where do you get the paternity records? He did used to be a rock and roller, so there could be something to that. I don't know. Right. Well, it just goes on and on. And the other problem for me, which is a huge, huge problem, is that their media has no allegiance to the truth.

So one thing that's really terrible and affecting our political life right now is that they're claiming that the Democrats support the idea of what they call abortion on demand up to the day of birth. This is absolutely untrue. This is a lie. No Democrat has ever supported abortion on demand up to the day of birth, and yet they keep repeating it. Trump repeats it. Ted Cruz repeats it. And when you have people who live in environments where the local newspaper has died off and they don't follow real news, you repeat it often enough and they'll believe it. And I think the thing you talked about is they have built a very insidious PR network, working through radio, taking over radio,

and all the different outlets that they can use to just push this information, disinformation, lies. You know, they really pound on the abortion issue because it gets people fired up, like nothing gets them fired up like that. And originally they wanted Ted Cruz to be president, right? Yes, Ted Cruz was their number one choice, and he simply had a charisma deficit that prevented this from happening. And so they pivoted to Donald Trump. And there's a lot of resistance in their ranks among the fundamentalists because Trump was really, really not of their

culture. In some ways, he was the opposite. But it was this moment of transactional politics where they cut a deal in June 2016. And they said to Trump, we'll give you our ground game. We'll give you our money. We'll give you our media. And in return, you give us our judges. And Trump has completed, well, both sides have completed their part of the bargain. And most people don't realize, like even I didn't, you know, I was like, I don't know why fundamentals support them. They support them because they're listening to these guys' radio. They're listening to their media. They're listening to their stuff.

And that's what's really driving this deal with Satan. And a lot of people think, well, I'm doing this for Jesus and stuff. And they don't realize that they're just playthings of these billionaires around this organization that are just, you know, making everything go around. It's really tragic because I'm from the Southwest myself, and I'm from Oklahoma. And what you see there is a kind of laboratory experiment for these policies. What does it result in? Well, it results in public schools being starved of resources. You have teachers who are having to try to get by on $30,000 a year and have to have big sales to buy pencils for the kids. You have a large number of people living without health insurance and right now a COVID spike. So it's just cruel. It's just cruel, and it afflicts the most vulnerable of our

population. Their agenda just reminds me of a semi-polite ISIS. I mean, they want to take over schools, and they want to brainwash all of our kids with Christian theology. And I guess basically the premise is you're just going to do it because we're just going to take over the schools. You're going to learn about Jesus as a Christian. It almost seems like the Constitution is going to go out in flames, and the Bible is just going to become the Constitution. Am I being a little too over the top? Well, you know, ISIS is an organization that resorts to violent means, and that's not really what this is about.

Yeah, they're semi-polite. That's why I put that. But I did see the trucks. The trucks were rolling into Seattle, so that looked very ISIS to me. Well, but, you know, I spent several years researching this book. And what I found was that most of their activities were legal and highly strategic. And so if you read Shadow Network, you'll see that I'm also very critical of Democrats for being asleep at the wheel and assuming that simply because they had the majority of public opinion on issues like health care and women's rights, that they had won the game. And you look at the way our government is actually set up with the Senate and the Electoral College, and they were playing the wrong game on the wrong board.

And so if you have this branch of the their extremism as the only Republican Party. And that's what they're seeking to do with the rest of the country. So it really, you know, there has never been a more important election in my lifetime than the one that's coming up in November. Yeah. Do you see them seizing fascist control or encouraging Trump to seize fascist control, seize power? Well, again, as somebody who's written a lot of history, I try to use a lot of precision in language.

And certainly there's an authoritarian strain to what they're doing. But I do really see it as operational and transactional they've figured out the loopholes in our system and frankly i feel that we as americans should have addressed them much earlier on citizens united which allows corporations to have an outsized role in our national life and act as citizens well they're not citizens they're corporations and their goal is not to serve the common good. It's to make quarterly profits. Fair enough, but have them represented for what they are.

The same thing with all of the gerrymandering that's gone on and the voter suppression. If we're going to claim that we're a democracy, we have to act like one. And these organizations have found the loopholes in our system and exploited them to the hilt. It's really crazy. I mean, it almost sounds like a complete takeover. And yeah, they may be polite now and they may be nice now, but once they meet resistance, especially if under authoritarian rule, then that's when the violence comes. That's what always happens in authoritarian rule. If they were to seize power or, you know, I mean, Trump is, if Trump gets reelected, he's

going to continue disassembling the government. Betsy DeVos is going to continue disassembling the, the, the board of education. They're going to look for different ways. Most, for the most part, as far as I'm concerned right now, they're looking for that fascist authoritarian violent event. They're looking for a violent event where they can go, you know what, we have to consolidate power so we can fix and put World War II. And it really, studying that period really showed me the role of street violence in these processes. And in that case, in Germany in the late 20s and 30s, you had Hitler's brown shirts holding marches and demonstrations in the streets, but you also had communists, and they would get into slugfests. They'd just start beating each other up, and the police would break it up, and it would be a big mess. And one of the things that

allowed the Nazis to seize power was to point to that street violence and say, see, we will maintain law and order. So the ultimate step was declaring a state of emergency, unsuspending civil liberties, and so on. And that's why it is so important at this moment to keep things as calm as possible and not give anyone any excuse for fomenting violence and then pointing to it as a reason to exert control. And I think we've seen some trial balloons of that in Portland.

You know, we're seeing, if you remember, it was a Portland or Seattle, we had the guys coming in with the Trump trucks and they were fighting and paintballing each other. I think on election night, no one's going to know who won, evidently. That can cause a lot of discourse. I've even read things that Trump could claim early on that he won

because the red vote will be in, but the other part will be in the mail. So who knows where this goes? But I think it's really interesting. Let's talk some more about this network because they built this thing over 40 years this isn't like something betsy devos rolled over one day and went let's do this let's talk about what's in your book about how they built this four-year coup d'etat if you will well and again it was a way of finding and exploiting loopholes in the existing system. So they didn't really need a coup. It starts in 1981, and this was a moment right after the fundamentalists in the Southwest, especially Dallas, which is where my book Shadow Network opens.

And they find that Ronald Reagan is a candidate that could help them get what they wanted. Now, again, Reagan was no more of a fundamentalist than Donald Trump was. He was a movie star who drank, smoked, and was divorced. I believe the mediums and psychics. But he was useful, and they cut a deal. And then in 1981, they found the Council for National Policy. And their founders include a strategist, Paul Weirich. It includes the master of direct mail for politics, Richard Vigery.

And it included a very interesting fellow who should be better known. His name is Morton Blackwell. And he founded something called the Leadership Institute, which trains conservative fundamentalist candidates and campaign managers. And they claim to have trained over 200,000 people since its founding. So you think of every election in the United States, and that's extraordinary coverage, right? And so they have these principles, which I describe in the book, that they very patiently play out over the decades. And you can see a lot of them in action right now. They have ground troops.

So you have organizations associated with the Council for National Policy that are going door to door, doing door to door canvassing in swing states, whereas the Democrats are not doing it. And I'm not, I mean, I don't have a way to predict how effective it was, but I would think that people who have been quarantined and are bored with COVID are quite happy to see a masked, distanced young person who feels like a chat on their doorstep. They've got the Susan B. Anthony list going like gangbusters doing this in swing states and basically selling the idea that Democrats like to rip babies limb from limb. Wow.

And it's just extraordinary. I mean, they use this as a hot button. This is the manipulative um uh what's the right word i mean it's it's like where donald trump found the wall and like everyone like like he's like hey they really freak out when you say that stuff rather than a matter of principle it has been very very carefully honed through focus groups and framing of political rhetoric. They even hit upon this term partial birth abortion, which is not, it doesn't exist. There is no medical procedure that is called that.

But they found through their focus group and their testing that it evoked a very emotional reaction in people, and that's what they preyed on. Yeah, and so they just play that, beat that drum, and the Christians fall through. The Christians have no idea what they're lining up for, supporting at this point, because those guys are going to take away everything.

Like you say, there's Social Security, corporations, where you don't pay any money, but then it's going to just become worse. I don't even know how the American people are going to carry. I suppose if you get rid of Social Security and entitlements, this gets rid of some of the debt, I guess, of the national debt or something. Yeah, which has been run up by all of these tax breaks for the billionaires in the top 1%. And excuse me, why shouldn't they pay their fair share of taxes?

Why should they be exempt when the rest of us pay ours? Yeah, it's insane. I mean, the American people are just fetting around with these stupid little things and these billionaires are just running everything and they have no idea what their agenda is, where they're going with it. Quite extraordinary. So what were some of the stories that really surprised you as you went through and wrote the book? Well, one of the things that did surprise me was that this group has waged a war on the LGBT population for years. And it's really painful because it's made people suffer. They push things like conversion therapy, which is really damaging to young people. And then for me, the surprise was all of the skeletons in their closets where people pushing these policies were arrested

for predatory behavior of minors of the same sex. Yeah. And so the book describes various cases of this, including, you know, leaders of the Southern Baptist Church. And, you know, and as well, if you read Shadow Network, you'll see that they're putting themselves up on stained glass windows as a model of sainthood and then being revealed to have committed these these crimes wow it's really interesting and insidious you know i mean we've seen that for a long time in the in the um in the area of religion where we have these preachers that you know

it's like the the more they speak out against lgbt, the more likely we are that one day, you know, the news pops up, Hey, we found him with two boys and a, and a massage thing and meth. And you're just like, Oh wow. What? Didn't see that one coming. Like, like I just know now the more that there's some preacher complaining about LGBTQ that, uh, yeah, you're just like, give that one a year. We're going to find out more about that guy. I know. And you know what, Chris?

I mean, I have to say, having grown up in the Southwest, I have to grieve for the kind of repression that that represents. These must be really tormented people to have, you know, wage a campaign against what they fear they are. So, and there's this remarkable reporter in Texas, Robert Downen, who did an amazing series about the sex scandals in the Southern Baptist Church. It didn't get enough attention nationally, but you just wanted to say to them, loosen up a little bit and live a normal

life and maybe you won't need to wage these wars against everyone else yeah the the uh i spent quite a bunch of time uh in earlier years in utah and utah has a pretty hard heart it used to have a pretty hard line against uh lgbtq and i i knew people that committed suicide that were gay because their family ostracizes them the thing that warren mccull teaches is is you have to cut those people off from your life uh if they're not involved and uh and so the the suicide rates here i think are still high for gay people in in utah yeah yeah it's great it's cruel on so many fronts, you know, and I do feel that it's so important as a civic culture to just look out for each other, look out for other people's kids, right? Look out for other people's elderly parents. And this is all about the opposite. It's just like, you know, grabbing everything for themselves. And in the book, I talk a little bit about how there is this long history of this religious belief that God rewards the virtuous and punishes the sinful. And I just can't accept the idea that if a kid is going hungry, it's because God's punishing them.

This is not a modern way of thinking. It's quite interesting. Yeah. And they're very anti-science too. I mean, these guys are full white national Christian people, racist. They're like the extreme right of religion, correct? Well, I find the race issue complicated because racism comes in many different packages some very overt and some subtle um and they the the council for national policy does include some african-americans um so like ben carson or something if they're well yeah but that was the king's niece. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So there is something else more complicated going on there, but I will say that it's all about short-term profits.

So it's very much tied into the oil industry as well as the DeVos empire in Michigan. You have a lot of Texas oil millionaires. You've got relationships with the Koch brothers empire that are varying degrees of closeness. And the idea there, I mean, some of them are very intelligent people. So they know about science, but it's an idea of eking out every last penny of profit until they have to stop. They know that alternative energy is inevitable. It's coming. But they want to get everything they can,

even to the detriment of the environment that we all inhabit. You know, we had an author on recently, and he talked about how a lot of these billionaires are, and people like Mark Zuckerberg and Betsy DeVos and stuff stuff these people don't care about nations like they don't care about this that or the other they're they're i forget what he called them neopolitical it's like they don't they don't care they just want whoever will whoever work with them and whoever will let them do whatever sort of evil they want um and it was interesting to me when you talked about how originally they wanted you know to take Cruz and then they didn't basically they made a deal with Donald Trump and Donald Trump

knows there's bread is buttered I guess yeah yeah and again it's transactional politics where okay so you would hope that that representational politics would look at people's genuine interests, which would be food, housing, health care, education, the basics, right? that might be absolute ban on abortion and anti-LGBT policies. Then you get them to disregard everything that affects their daily lives. That's what the strategy has been. And so they vote to the detriment of their daily lives because they think that they're winning on these areas that have become an artificial focus. That's how it basically operates.

Yeah, well, that makes sense, seeing what we're seeing in the politics of things. The only problem is they don't realize that they're all going to be sitting around someday going, yeah, we let Betsy DeVos win and we stopped abortion, but now Social Security's gone and we have no safety net, no Medicare, and I guess we can go work in the fields if we want our pay. It seems like almost a light version of servitude or indentured servitude. Well, Chris, you know, life expectancy in the United States rose for a century until this year when it fell. COVID is one of those factors.

And there is a kind of bait and switch going on in political terms, because what they do is the Trump administration has totally mangled any kind of public health policy, worse than any other industrialized nation. We're a national tragedy and an embarrassment. So the bait and switch comes where they say, oh, well, last spring it was in New York City and there's a Democratic mayor, so it's his fault. Oh, well, there's a Democratic county commissioner in Iowa. It's his fault. It's everybody's fault except for the people who are actually in charge.

Yeah, I'm taking the turn next week. It's supposed to be my fault. It's on the schedule. Oh, good. Yeah. Shame on you. Damn it. What was I thinking? I turn next week. It's supposed to be my fault. It's on the schedule. Oh, good. Yeah. Shame on you. Damn it. What was I thinking?

I don't know. How did I get? Anyway. There was a question I had or a concept that we had and escaped me with that joke but uh um yeah uh the people and this probably explains why donald trump and in the republican party are trying to destroy the obamacare through the thing and they keep lying that they have a program they don't have a program they don't want to put forth a program is that correct is this part of the betsy devos agenda where they're they're going to destroy obamacare there's just gonna be nothing except for healthcare companies, I guess, that can make profit. Well, and Betsy DeVos has always been

about education and about undermining public education. The whole issue around Obamacare, things are divided up among them as though they're portfolios in a shadow cabinet. So yes, they want to do away with Obamacare. And it's basically all driven by a model for private profit. The sad part is that the model we have now based on private profit is incredibly expensive and utterly inefficient and has bad results, has bad outcomes. So Americans spend over a third of their healthcare costs, which are the most expensive in the world, right, on administration and bureaucracy. The health insurance companies make these enormous salaries for their CEOs in the tens of millions. They screw the people on the bottom by saying, oh, we're not going to reimburse you for your costs out of pocket.

And by the way, if you have preexisting conditions, if they have their way with this, you don't even get health insurance. I guess you can either sell your house or die. That's where it's going. It's counterintuitive to me that that's what anybody would want. It's extraordinary because all the Christians will be sitting around where they can't get health insurance. They're all dying. They'll be like, we beat abortion. Good for that okay well let that be your dying breath like your emails well and and i'll take a little issue

with that when when you use the term christian because you know there there are many many christians in the united states and many varieties and there are even many varieties of evangelicals and varieties of fundamentalists. You have a certain number of people who have been informationally isolated, right? So they're acting according to the information in their environment. The problem is that it's distorted and often factually wrong. So that's what's driving them to vote. And one of the things I talk about in Shadow Network is the way that some of these churches

have been operationalized. So these organizations draw up voter guides and they'll say, oh, the Democrat supports the homosexual agenda, quote unquote, right? They put this in the voter guide in the church bulletin, and the Republican opposes the homosexual agenda. Well, what is the so-called homosexual agenda? What thing is that? It doesn't exist, right? But they pump this stuff out in the churches, and then the congregants feel the pressure of the peer pressure and the pressure of the authority of the church. The pastors feel a pressure. And they're really, you know, these are people whose faith is being weaponized,

and that's just not right. I would totally agree with you. I mean, it's the same thing with ISIS. I mean, no one the same thing with ISIS. I mean, no one goes off and beheads somebody just because they're like, well, I woke up, well, I don't know, I've done it before, if I don't get enough coffee in the morning. But, you know, I mean, it takes an extraordinary amount of things. And whether you're a victim or not, well, you've made that choice. So, yeah, I mean, you're right.

We can't blanket all the Christians being bad. In fact, we've had people on the show that have done extensive studies and shown that there's like four segments of them. There's one that's about 20, 20, 30% that's really the extreme white nationalists. These guys are really into racism and all this stuff. And then it breaks down into some guys that are kind of, they just kind of go along with those guys but they're they're kind of uh conflicted um and then sounds like sam perry and andrew whitehead who are yeah great guys so uh what are some other aspects of your book or what are some things that people should know well i'm really concerned about media

systems because ultimately you vote according to the information that you have. So if you're living in one of these Midwestern states, like a lot of my relatives, radio is really important, right? And a lot of people on the coast and in the cities don't recognize this. But in the Midwest, or in your part of the world, you spend a lot of time in the car, right? And a lot of times in the car, you have the radio on. And whereas we've abandoned radio news from an industry standpoint, they've moved into that space. And they have things that are packaged as news programs. They're called news programs, but they don't have any fact-based reporting to them they're all editorializing in support of

republicans so people are just awash yeah yes this media it's kind of the fox news radio with things like the christian broadcasting network and the trinity broadcasting network which again there's something called christian Network News, and it's the same story. There's no professional reporting. There's no fact-based reporting. It's all pure support getting then that may well be how they're going to vote and and as a nation we have to address this it's it's urgent i mean i don't know how much can be done before november but if we have a political culture after november it really has to be on the agenda yeah it really does and and i mean, these radio stations are part of the Betsy DeVos, this network that they have, right, with the council. Well, again, Betsy DeVos wouldn't have much to do with the radio station. I just keep throwing her under the bus. I know, you really

go for that, Betsy. Yeah, I got an issue with her. Yeah, yeah. Well, and, you know, her mother is one of the reigning leaders of the Council for National Policy. Wow. Her father and her father-in-law were both very important members. So I call her the crown princess and her brother Eric Prince as the crown prince. That's the other interesting thing about this whole thing, the Eric Prince. A lot of people don't realize these guys are tied together. They're siblings, yeah.

I'm not sure. Is Eric Prince allowed in the country anymore? I think I heard he escaped to uh to saudi arabia he's he's been very busy and you know what i talk about in shadow network is that betsy and the family war councils had the education portfolio her job was to undermine public education and my, she rose to a position that gives her a lot of latitude for that. Eric Prince was Minister of War. And he had gone to one of the service academies and didn't manage to graduate. And then he became a Navy SEAL.

And he's been busy organizing a kind of shadow paramilitary operation in various forms. And he's still involved in that. Yeah. So there, and again, neither Betsy nor Eric appears to have been a member of the council for national policy,

but both of their parents and her father-in-law has, has been very, have been very important in the council. And they really do enact their policies very directly. It's just crazy, man. Trump does whatever he wants. But in terms of the radio, you've got this organization called Salem Media. It started out as some fundamentalist kind of hillbilly stations in Southern California. And then it expanded nationally.

And they own hundreds of radio stations, and they distribute their content to something like 3,000 radio stations. Wow. And so the two founders and owners of Salem Media are very important members of the Council for National Policy. And they've also diversified. So if your readers have ever come across books from the political right from Regnery Publishing, you'd be amazed at how

many of these books they publish. That's one of their subsidiaries. The Daily Caller is another one. CJ Media is another one. So if you go to their website, they've got a whole I mean dozens of subsidiary online platforms. So then they'll take content and repurpose it across platforms until people are absolutely engulfed in this messaging.

It's like watching Fox News or OAN Network 24-7. Fox News is connected and Todd Starnes, who's been involved with Fox News, has been a member of the Council for National Policy. It's not quite as directed as it has been for Salem Media. And by the way, Salem Media radio division has been tied with CBS as the fifth largest network in the country.

Wow. That's how many people are listening and tuning into that crap. Absolutely. And they were given a place in the White. Wow. And that's how many people are listening and tuning into that crap. Absolutely. And they, they were given a place in the white house press gallery. They were given an exclusive day of coverage in the white house. Right. And again,

sitting here in New York, I would never have heard of them if I had not. I had never heard of until I saw your stuff. The, um, what about that? Uh, TV,

there's a TV network that owns like a lot of local channels like 200 or something i forget the name of them sinclair are they part of this whole thing not not certainly not directly okay um but you know it's almost as though if you've seen an article about it in the new york times it's not part of this group. Oh, there you go. You know, they've really managed to be very much off the radar. And the other thing is, people have to remember that the 2016 elections were determined by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states, right? Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

And in one of those cases, it was 11,000 votes. Yeah. So we're talking about tiny, tiny slivers of voters. And the old style campaigning would be put an ad on television during the six o'clock news. Well, you don't know, you know, that's really expensive, right? And it's throwing mud at the wall. You don't know who's watching and you don't know what they care about. You don't know whether your message speaks to them or not. So what you have now is this whole world of micro-targeting where they know your age. They know what you eat.

They know what you watched on Netflix. And so they can target you through your social media and through the door-to-door canvassing with very specific messaging and arguments that are designed to appeal to you. And they did this in large part through a state-of-the-art data platform that was paid for by the Koch brothers, I-360. So you've got this constellation of political communications, again, very much off the radar, and the Democrats have been playing catch-up ball on this front. Yeah, I think you talked about how they don't bother about winning the popular election. They learned a long time ago that all they've got to do is jigger, jimmy-rig that that electoral college and that's what they did in 2016 correct well yeah i mean but that's really how our system is set up and we didn't really you know it's it's you know the way i feel is that we have this system of government that was incredibly advanced when it was set up in the 1780s. It was really, really modern.

Well, it has aged. And a lot of other democracies have stepped back and they've looked at how representation works, how their legislation works, how their media works, and they've made adjustments. Now, if you are somebody who thinks that the the government should remain the way it was when it was originated that leaves you with a lot of things that are not modern such as slavery and women who can't vote etc etc so i just feel like these, these huge items on the agenda, campaign financing is one dealing with the electoral college and senatorial

representation is another and how you inform the public through the news media is the third. And those are urgent items for our national agenda. I would totally agree. I would also, I would also say we need laws that say, you know, for the president. I mean, what's been extraordinary to see with, you know, all these different kind of quote-unquote rules we had, like, oh, every president releases tax returns. Like, all these things were just voluntary, you know, goodwill sort of things. And, like, even the Monuments Clause and stuff, and you're like, well, how do we enforce that?

Well, I don't know. It's just something that's bad in the Constitution. It's like we had this system of, like, an honor system for the whole damn presidency that we just trusted these guys with. And we had no idea that when we got a real crook in there, a real monster, that we had little to no recourse. And so I think one of the other things we need to do is we need to lock down the presidency.

You need to have a drug check to get in there. You've got to release your tax returns. You've got to, you know, whatever. There needs to be a removal system too, or we can remove you from power by pulling the lever, just like you can for local elections. I don't know. Maybe that's too much to ask.

Yeah, Chris, I think that's a great point. And what you're saying is that we've operated on a system of norms, right? You know, you don't, you know, walk into a courtroom and, you know, you don't, you know, walk into a courtroom and, you know, throw water on people. Is there a law against that? Maybe, maybe not, but most people don't have to be told not to do these things, right? There are norms that people abide by. And what you have is, and if you go back and you look in my book, you'll find that what the architects of this movement are saying is we need to topple the system. Yeah. Topple the federal government and Trump will be our wrecking ball, quote unquote, our wrecking ball. So you have these people where even opponents, well, until recently,

even opponents in the Senate would abide by the norms, right? At least in recent decades. And one of the things you're running into as we speak is Mitch McConnell having violated the norms about the Merrick Garland nomination. It was a norm. And he said, well, it's not enforceable, so I will disregard it because I can. And now he's doing the same thing four years later. He's saying, well, the norm I established, I don't like anymore, so I'm changing the norm to suit myself. So it's a matter of whether these norms can be codified into laws to create a level playing field and a real political discourse. Because otherwise, if they let this just continue, American politics will degenerate totally into a kind of warfare that will not serve anyone well in the long run. Yeah. So let's play devil's advocate.

Let's say Trump wins in 2020. We're going to have another four years of him and this council that's going to be influencing things. They're going to get another few shot at some judges, most likely. What is our dystopian future that you see they're going on if they win so thanks a lot um so we've got three probable scenarios it looks like the democrats are going to hold on to the house so we'll put that aside. Scenario one is that Biden wins the House and the Senate, in which case there'll be a lot of this codification that I mentioned, where you have the drug test and the tax forms for the president and the other wins the Senate. And then you'll have a massive lame duck situation where you'll, you'll just have gridlock for four years and nobody will get very much done. And then the third scenario is that if Trump wins and the Republicans hold onto the Senate, which is quite possible, but it's not a done deal.

And at that point, they transform the judiciary and they've made it quite clear what their intentions are. Roll back Roe versus Wade have variousGBT measures go through. I don't know how far they'll go on that. I shudder to think because I think... They'd probably take back marriage. That could happen. Certainly, taxation that will benefit the 1%, and probably an all-out war on all social

programs, including Social Security, which had been regarded as untouchable. Yeah, they've been talking about getting rid of that for a long time. It's on their hit list. And then the other part of it is that they've been very sympathetic. I mean, the people they've appointed to the courts have been very sympathetic to measures of gerrymandering and voter suppression. So if they lock that in, then they can virtually guarantee their hold in power for the foreseeable future. Yeah. We've become, I think, what Jared Sexton, who was on our show, called a convenient, I think he called it a convenient democracy. It's

basically what they have in most authoritarian states, like Russia, where we let you vote, so you think you got something, but you don't. Go ahead and vote. Managed democracy, I believe, is what he called it. And, you know, it's like, we recently saw that Hungary, Poland,

what's the, Belarus, you know, you can have a vote but like it's gonna matter um and i think that's where we're going to i think uh one of the other stripes is going to be as if is if he were to be re-elected um uh and we we can capture the senate um the uh we're going to try and impeach him again. And then we're going to have another crisis because there really is no forced removal from the system. I mean, if Nixon had never wanted to be impeached, like, what do you do? You have to send the military to go down and convict him from the White House?

Like, there really is no enforcement. If the Democrats hold both houses of Congress, they'll have more latitude for acting on that. The makeup of the Supreme Court. The founding fathers said, oh, we'll have checks and balances. We'll have three

branches of government. So if you have the executive or the presidency and the legislative, the Congress and the presidency and the legislative the congress and the judiciary the courts where they're divided among the powers then they'll they'll they'll prevent each other from from abuses yeah so right now that you've got the house of representatives as representing the democrats and you've've got the judiciary hanging in the balance, which is why the White House and the Senate

have become so incredibly important and influential. If you lose all of that balance, I mean, all the House can do is control the purse strings, and that only to a certain degree because a lot of times it comes down to the showdown about do we close down the government in order to to express our policy and that's you know sudden death um so you say that's what is's going to come to. I say you've got six states in play in a very important way. Three of them are the same ones as the last time, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

And you also have the southern path. Florida's in play, North Carolina, and Arizona. Arizona is trending right now as it stands for Biden. And the northern states are tilting towards Biden. Florida and North Carolina are hanging in the balance. So what a relatively small number of Americans in these six states do will determine the future for the rest of us. Yeah.

It's crazy. Will the Democrats turn out to vote? Will millennials and, and minorities choose to take their, their, their votes to the, the ballot box instead of, you know,

thinking that they can just, you know, vent. of thinking that they can just vent? Will the churches mobilize the conservative fundamentalist churchgoers, or will the more moderate churchgoers come and turn out and vote their conscience? I mean, there's so many questions hanging in the balance, and there's so much that Americans who care about their political system can do. And I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg, passing away, may she rest in peace, is going to definitely be in the balance too. Because I think even people that are maybe moderate

or people that are slightly on the right are going to go, wait, they really are going to overturn Roe versus Wade, and I might want to still use my uterus. Maybe I should try and, you know, I mean, the guy's getting three shots at a, he's basically going to be almost one-third of the court in one season. If he goes to re-election, god knows what's going to happen with that court they're going to have most of it and i don't know we're just going to have right-wing stuff going all over the place they'll take away marriage they'll take you know they'll eliminate

abortion completely it'll go crazy man well and and it would be a terrible pity if people let their vote be determined by abortion. The historical record shows, by the way, that the number of abortions go down under democratic administrations, right? And what a moderate, careful abortion law does, which rules out late-term abortions, except in the most medically extreme cases, right? I mean, if the mother is going to die, then you consider it. And otherwise, it's not under consideration. But if you have these moderate laws, which the majority of Americans support,

public opinion is in favor of a moderate version of Roe versus Wade, which is what you have holding sway in the country. So that should not be the determining factor for anybody. And they should be looking at children who are born. They should be looking at their elderly parents in nursing homes where they're falling victim to COVID. They should be looking at their fellow citizens and saying, what do

we need in this country for a good and decent life? The sad part is, is most of what they should be reading, they call fake news and stuff like that. They don't even believe it. I was watching videos earlier today where they're interviewing people and they're like, well, you guys aren't wearing masks. You guys are out here, you know, this Trump convention. What do you think? Ah, it's fake. The whole thing's fake. You're just lying. No, but I don't know if they're like, well, you guys aren't wearing masks. You guys are out here, you know, this Trump convention. What do you think?

Ah, it's fake. The whole thing's fake. You're just lying. No, but I don't know if they're the majority. I don't know if they're the majority of the voters. So it's, again, odd that our future should hang on these narrow slices of voters in these six states. Yeah. I would like to see the electoral college def d d d fanged i mean it's a racist

it was originally built for racism back in the day and oppression and prejudice so yeah i i think it's ripe for reform absolutely and i mean the the whole the i i understand certain these states need to have their say but they get a vote and they get a Senate. They, you know, to have one third of the Senate that's able to control this whole damn country, the court and everything else. This is insane. Most of us live on the coasts and in large places. And the fact that our vote doesn't matter is just extraordinary. Like just extraordinary that a couple of crazies who live in Timbuktu. I'm not being mean, but I'm sorry. it's just extraordinary like just extraordinary that a couple crazies who live in

timbuktu i'm not being mean but i'm sorry that's just really you're talking about my relatives there sorry your relatives are nice people but you know if they're voting wrong they're crazy but i think there's a way to have balance and And when you look at the electoral college, first of all, back in the day, there was a cartoonist named Rube Goldberg. And he was famous for setting up these contraptions, right, that were held together with string and paperclips and things. And they were supposed to be hilarious. That's what the electoral college is. You don't even have every state using the same system to select its electors you don't have all the electors abiding by the same rules this is not a system this is a rube goldberg contraption that has been falling apart for a long time if you look at it very closely it makes no sense and we're better than that you know i mean we've got a lot of smart people in this country we can come up with something that's more logical right right? And again, the way that civilized people deal with their problems is that they sit down at the table, they put the facts on the table, and then they discuss

their mutual interests. They find their common ground. We are capable of that. We need to get to that place again. I would hope so. I would hope so. Anything more as we go out and to talk about your book or anything more we should need to know? Well, it's just that as people look at the elections, they should get away from their own media bubbles, whatever they are, and look at how our system really works. And if they want to have an impact, then look at the swing states. Look at how they may play a constructive role in the swing states then if things go well they look at how to reform the system so that our our outcome is not quite so arbitrary in terms of national representation but i think that go ahead no no i think i think

really informing yourself beyond whatever your usual media diet is is really important. And that's why I say they should get your book. I think they should get my book. They should read it. And there's a few other titles, and it sounds like you've interviewed some of these authors, Catherine Stewart, Sam Perry,

a lot of people thinking very deeply about these issues. And as I said, we've got the instruments to improve our system, and it's ready for improvement. Most definitely. Most definitely. So give us your plugs as we go out, where people can find you on the interwebs or the book and find out more about you.

Sure. My website is ann-nelson.com. And my book, Shadow Network, is available wherever books are sold. I encourage people to support their local independent bookstore. They can also go to a great big website named after a river in Brazil. And yeah, I think reading books right now is more important than ever because it's the deep dive, right? It puts the whole picture together, and you can get distracted by the daily noise and dust storms

of our political culture. Yeah, just listening to one hour of your presentation, Wisconsin, like I was, it blew me out of the water, and I'm sure there's lots more packed in the book. So everyone's sure of the book. It's Shadow Network, Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. And Anne, also, we want to get a plug in here. You've got a lot of other books.

Do you know how many books you've written? There's a lot here, so I'm not sure. Not really. I was one of the first staff members of Human Rights Watch. And so I wrote some things that were human rights reports that are kind of books. But if you look at all of my books, I think that they tell strong personal stories of real people.

And it puts them in the context of political crises. So I wrote Red Orchestra about the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. My previous book to this one was Suzanne's Children, about a woman who organized a rescue network for Jewish children in occupied Paris. Wow. So, yeah, and I'm heading up on the next one. And I just, I guess, you know what, Chris? I thought when I was in college that I was going to be a singer.

I thought I was going to be an astronaut. Well, no, but I was. And president. Yeah, yeah, but I was going in that career direction, and I just thought that the world had enough urgent concerns that if you could make a contribution to it, that that's how you should direct yourself. And so I've gone into human rights and writing these books as my path.

I still sing. There you go. But, you know, my motto in politics is nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something. That's a great motto. I like that. You should make a shirt on that. If you do something, we'll pull this situation out of the fire.

My fingers are crossed but in the meantime i'm going to go read uh your other book red orchestra the story of the berlin underground and circle of friends who resisted hitler so that i can survive trump uh part two don't give up i mean we we actually have a podcast called the resistance radio and i started it based upon the French resistance stuff that they did. So I'm probably going to be underground in a bunker, you know, doing broadcasts and interviewing people like you. The thing you'll see in these books is that resistance makes odd bedfellows, right? So right now, a lot of the most effective voices against Trump and this corrupt wing of the Republican Party

are traditional Republicans who say, wait a minute, you've hijacked our party. And that's what you have in these earlier resistance movements too. You've got leftists, you've got monarchists, you've got Protestants and Catholics and Jews, right? And they're all saying, no, we have to stand up for a common decency. So that's where you go with this. Hopefully so.

Hopefully so. All right, folks, well, check that out. Order up her book. You can go to Amazon.com. You can also see all the books of all the authors at Amazon.com, 4-shop, 4-ChrisVoss. Follow me on Goodreads.com under Chris Voss. And join the group we have.

If you follow me, I'll just get you invited. Also, you can see us now on Amazon Music and on top of the other syndications, youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Refer your friends to the cvpn.com, Chris Voss Podcast Network, to all nine podcasts. We really appreciate you guys tuning in. We appreciate Anne for being with us here today. Thank you, Anne.

Thank you. Thank you. And to my audience, be safe, be wise, register to vote during it, get everyone you know to vote and go vote. We'll see you next time.