Deep Anti-State Skulduggery

The reclusive, anti-social, Robert Mercer made billions applying his mathematical expertise to hedge fund algorithms at Renaissance Technologies then, abetted by his daughter Rebekah, turned his attention to using similar means for the purpose of political disruption.

During the Clinton administration Mercer bought into many of the loonier conspiracy theories about the first family and the animus has never left him. Despite a complete lack of evidence he believes Clinton and the CIA were smuggling drugs into Arkansas. During the Gulf War, he believed the United States should seize the chance to expropriate Middle East oil.

Want more? He argues that the danger of climate change and nuclear war are over-rated and that the Japanese after the atomic bombs were actually more heathy thanks to radiation. And according to a coworker, he is not just libertarian, but nearly anarchist. “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust government…He wants it all to fall down.”

This may be amusing on talk radio or in the kookier quarters of the blogosphere, but the Mercers have put their money where their fevered convictions are. In 2011 they joined the Koch machine’s Donor Fund to deny Obama a second term, but they also joined the farther right Council for National Policy, a few hundred wealthy conservatives who traffic in lurid conspiracy theories.

There they met Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie. soon they devoted $2 million to the latter’s Citizens United which specialized in Clinton demonization. In 2013, the Mercers gave another $2 million to the Government Accountability Institute, a Bannon nonprofit dedicated to digging up dirt on Democrats and peddling it to the media, a process described as “weaponizing” information.

Eventually these investments bore strange fruit. The Citizens United court case ruling permitted billionaires and corporations to anonymously flood elections with cash under the guise of free speech, and the book and movie “Clinton Cash” smeared the 2016 Democratic front runner.

Also in 2013, Rebekah Mercer began to lose patience with the Koch operation once it had failed to prevent Obama’s re-election. The Mercers wanted results. By then Bannon was urging them to invest in Breitbart News and a data analytics firm, Strategic Communication Laboratories (now SCL Group) that could use algorithms to influence which way unsuspecting voters cast their ballots.

In the same year, Patrick Caddell, the populist pollster, brought to the Mercers’ attention results suggesting real anger left and right with wealthy elites and the mainstream parties. He told them the time was ripe for a ”strong man,” insurrectionist, outsider candidate to take on the major parties and the ruling class.

By 2014, the Mercers had put millions into Breitbart News and an SCL subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica. SCL was mining Facebook data and Cambridge planned to weaponize the data for American elections. Bannon was now their man, installed at Breitbart and with Rebekah Mercer in change of Cambridge.

They were also sending foreign consultants to embed with 2014 congressional campaigns, and were testing a variety of inflammatory slogans. They discovered several that were very potent with segments of the electorate — “drain the swamp,” “the deep state,” and “build the wall.” By 2016, the covert cyber-war machine was ready.

Under Bannon, Breitbart’s mission was to undermine Hillary Clinton and it used data analytics to identify which red meat phrases, stories and conspiracy theories worked, so that they could be repeated. Cambridge Analytica was using Facebook to empower personalized messaging aimed at suppressing the black vote, polarizing the electorate and demonizing Clinton.

For the Republican nomination, the Mercers first backed Ted Cruz for the role of populist disrupter, but he underperformed and they settled on Trump as the most useful tool to attack the status quo and undermine the federal government.

By the middle of 2016, the full Mercer apparatus was in change of the Trump Campaign with Bannon, Conway and Bossie in key roles. Bannon had Trump buy $5.9 million in services from Cambridge and had him repeating the slogans that had tested well.

Cambridge Analytica personnel were embedded in Trump’s data operation run by Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner. So were employees of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, helping the campaign use their platforms to influence attitudes of key voter blocs.

The rest is history. Trump is president, but the investigations are just beginning. The least fleshed out piece is the connections between the Trump campaign, the Mercer operation and Cambridge Analytica on the one hand and Russia and Wikipedia on the other. While still murky, links have been identified.

They include the Trump organization’s reliance on Russian money to finance its projects and buy its properties, relationships with Russian oligarchs and mob figures. Then there are the facts that in 2014 it was a Russian-American, Alexandr Kogan, who created the app to harvest Facebook data for Cambridge and in the same year Russian hackers visited America to gather data to perfect their methods.

By the time the election process began, 150 million Americans were seeing really fake news from Russian trolls, spies from Western democracies were detecting connections between Russian intelligence operatives and the Trump campaign, Russians were hacking the DNC, Russian twitter accounts were praising Trump, Kremlin-connected actors were buying propaganda ads on Facebook, Don Jr., Rebekah Mercer and Roger Stone were in touch with Wikileaks, and a pol close to Putin, Konstantin Rykov, has claimed he colluded with Trump and Cambridge to influence the outcome of the election.

This fact pattern suggests a den of thieves, including anti-democratic billionaires, a hostile foreign power, unregulated internet networks and companies, and right wing activists, managed to use technology to undermine an American presidential election and elect their version of the Manchurian Candidate. Robert Mueller is on the case and plows forward, but the executive branch refuses to acknowledge the facts and the coequal legislative branch at best seems more interested in retaining power than investigating, at worst is collaborating in obstructing justice and, arguably, treason.

You’d think this threat would unite a nation whose government was attacked and may be again attack by malign actors within and without, but no. The easily distracted electorate, aided and abetted by a TV news hound pack, has a short attention span and is prepared each day to chase the latest hare — a shooting, a tweet, a porn star, a march of protest, the return of Roseanne, bread and circuses.

Nothing I have passed on in this blog is due to my work, just my morbid curiosity. For those wth a taste for our alarming reality, I recommend the following:

“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer.

“Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and the Revelations of Open Secrets,” Sue Halpern, New Yorker, March 21, 2018

“The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon behind the Trump Presidency,” Jane Mayer, New Yorker, Ma y27,2017.

Trump-Russia Timeline at billmoyers.com.
C
ambridge Analytica reporting from The Guardian, especially by Carole Cadwalladr

Roots Of The Deep Anti-State

Little by little, Robert Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, whistleblowers and investigative reporters are piecing together the story behind the plot to subvert democratic government in America. The picture that is taking shape includes President Trump and the creatures around him, but the conspiracy is far wider than the 2016 election, and goes back much further.

According to the fever dream of the right, there’s a Deep State that secretly rules America, an organization akin to earlier fantasies such as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission. And the idea has been sold so incessantly that a recent poll showed that 74% of American believe in the deep state, defined as “a collection of unelected officials running policy.”

Well, yes, I suppose. That’s called the civil service of the government of the United States. These are the people who turn on the lights and sweep the floor in government buildings, inspect the meat we eat and the drugs we take, staff the parks we visit and do all the daily tasks beneath the dignity and salary demands of the four thousand political appointees that change every four or eight years as new administrations take over.

Without them your Social Security check would not be in the mail, your passport request would not be processed, the CDC would not monitor the latest contagious disease outbreak or FEMA show up after the tornado, hurricane or earthquake.

But if the Deep State is a fiction, there really is a Deep Anti-State that works in the shadows. The philosophy of the Deep Anti-State is libertarian with nativist and isolationist elements. Its roots go back to anti-communist extremist groups like the John Birch Society and the works of Ayn Rand.

The gospel they believe in is a species of self-serving social and economic Darwinism. The very rich believe the fittest are those with the most money. In their view, government is largely a tool used by the inferior to steal money from those who earned it. Communism was up front about it, but in their eyes all governments are the enemy and hide their motives under egalitarian, altruistic, communitarian rhetoric.

The unceasing aim of the Deep Anti-State is to undermine the government of the United States, especially its power to tax and regulate, the better to keep power (and money) where it belongs — in the hands of unelected oligarchs and their tools. It numbers many millionaires and billionaires among its members. In the last several decades many of them have worked to create an elaborate Deep Anti-State infrastructure of publishing, media, propaganda, lobbying think tanks and educational institutions.

Funding for these endeavors has come from many wealthy families, funneled through, for example, the Olin, Bradley, Sciafe and Koch foundations. They work through entities that do not bear their names but churn out spin and policy prescriptions they favor. These fronts boast anodyne, patriotic names like The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, The Ayn Rand Institute (they like the word institute), The Heritage Foundation and The Tax Foundation.

Misleading advertising in favor of cutting taxes, cutting deficits and cutting spending on safety net programs are designed to persuade average voters that legislation that will actually be bad for them will be good for them. It is run by front groups with populist names like Americans for Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and the Heartland Institute.

The Citizens United court decision in 2010 made the funding of elections and propaganda on issues on a vast scale by a few very wealthy individuals legal. Hiding their hands to disguise their power became increasingly important, lest the average voter conclude the game was rigged against his interests, as it was. Under the leadership of the Kochs, The Donors Trust was created whereby plutocrats could pool their money and hide the source of the funds from prying eyes. By 2014, 100 oligarchs contributed more to influence elections that the 4,750,000 people who gave $200 or less to elect the candidates of their choice.
And it has worked. Starting at the grassroots, Deep Anti-State money has elected many pliant legislators and governors at the state level. They in turn have passed laws to gerrymander districts to favor more Deep Anti-State candidates and to suppress the votes of groups unlikely to favor their agenda, including minorities, the poor and the young.

Courts have struck down some of these laws, but that may change. The Deep Anti-State funds The Federalist Society. It has outposts in most of the country’s law schools and powerful legal practices, grooming like-minded lawyers for appointment to the bench. Trump, like Republican presidents before him, has chosen his court nominees from a list approved by the Federalist Society. As of the beginning of 2018, he had named eighteen judges from the Federalist list, and four of the nine Supreme Court justices were members of the fraternity – Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.

The Donors also play a long game by contributing money to universities to slant the teaching of history and economics in favor of their belief system. Recipients include Brown, SMU, UNC-Chapel Hill, Baylor, Catholic University, NYU, Indiana Tech, Ohio State, Utah State and many more.

Despite all this firepower and success in infecting the body politic with their Deep Anti-State ideas, drawing districts to favor their candidates and suppressing the vote of their foes, by 2013 it became apparent that what they were selling was unpopular with the majority of middle class voters. Barack Obama was re-elected, and many people hurt by the Great Recession did not believe unfettered capitalism and small government were in their best interest.

It turned out they wanted affordable health care, a clean environment, opportunity for all, not just profits for some, rights for workers, good public education, and a minimum wage. All anathema to the Deep Anti-State.

The oligarchs began to retool their strategy leading up to 2104, and a new weaponized means of corrupting the vote emerged, using high technology and the low road of treason. Next time: The Deep Anti-State and the Mercers, Breitbart, Wikileaks, Putin, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook.

A Quartet To Remember

In my editorial page days, I enjoyed the occasional opportunity to write a remembrance of the great and good, and sometimes the vile and villainous. For Dr. Seuss I wrote a memorial piece in his own rhyming style, which was fun and greatly enhanced by an art department contribution of a weeping Cat in the Hat.

I also admit to a special fondness for an editorial on the death of the 37th President beginning as follows: “Richard Nixon spent the last twenty years of his life trying to keep Watergate out of the first sentence of his obituary. He failed.”

But today I come to ignore the ignominious, not to prang them. Instead, I’d like to pay homage to the lives of several interesting and admirable men who died in recent days.

Roger Bannister was a seventeen-year-old Oxford student when he first put on spikes to run on a track. As an undergraduate and then as a medical student he competed in races and was invited to join the British team at the 1948 Olympics. He declined, feeling he was not ready for competition on that level. By 1952, however, he was winning 1500-meter and mile races and competed in the Helsinki games.

He continued to train, though he was now a young doctor, and in 1954 at a meet at Oxford became he first man to run a mile in under four minutes, a mark which seemed as elusive as the sound barrier. The record stood for a mere 46 days, but Bannister became a national hero in an austere postwar England in need of them.

He was also a model of the amateur sportsman, in an era before everything, including the Olympics, was professionalized. After the mile record, he more of less hung up his spikes and went on to a distinguished career as a neurologist with over 80 scientific papers to his credit. He died at 88.

Speaking of Brits and science, Stephen Hawking died of a rare form of ALS at the age of 76, about fifty years older than his doctors predicted when he was diagnosed. Though eventually rendered mute and immobile by the disease, his mind could still encompass the cosmos, and technology allowed him to communicate, to collaborate with fellow scientists, tutor postgraduates, and write a best-selling book that probably befuddled a majority of his readers.

For the layman, Einsteinium space-time, was just about graspable, quantum mechanics bordering on voodoo and the stuff in which Hawking trafficked otherworldly — gravitational physics, black holes, event horizons, singularities, cosmological inflation. Without the math, you can only bow down as before a demigod whose claims you must take on faith.

His ideas impressed his peers sufficiently for him to win endless awards, though he also engaged in lively disagreements and wagers. His obvious enjoyment of his celebrity was charming, as he lent his attention to such things as children’s’ books written with his daughter, cameos on “The Big Bang Theory,” and warnings about the threat to humankind from alien encounters, nuclear arms, climate change and AI.

In his last paper he described a universe fading to black as it ran down. The same process of entropy finally overcame him, but his memory will survive as he will be interred in Westminster near the graves of Newton and Darwin.

Another kind of timelessness was represented by the couture of Hubert Givenchy. He was the least faddish of designers, preferring elegance of line to rococo extravagance. Most of us do not travel in the circles where we might encounter a woman wearing his simple, elegant and flattering clothes. They included an English Duchess, German Baroness, Italian Countess, as well as Rothschilds and Whitneys.

Yet we have all seen his clothes since he also dressed Jacquline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and, his ideal model, Audrey Hepburn in “Sabrina,” “Funny Face,” “Love in the Afternoon,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “Charade.” Here was art as sublime as any sculpture or painting on the wall. Givenchy was 91 at his death in his chateau in the Loire.

Last, but far from least, T. Berry Brazelton also died this month at the age of 90. For my mother’s generation, the go-to guide for coping with the mysteries of parenthood was Dr. Spock. For mine, it was Brazelton, a Texas pediatrician whose television program, “What Every Baby Knows” and newspaper column performed the invaluable function of allowing freaked out parents to calm down and enjoy their baby’s development.

He was a soothing, non-judgmental, engaging presence. Interestingly, he admitted that he always loved babies, but at first found it hard to be as cozy with their parents, probably because his own mother had made it plain that she preferred his brother and treated him in a cold and distant manner, as if he was as an unwelcome intruder.

Of course, he eventually made it part of his life’s work to encourage countless mothers and fathers not to do that. He was a lovely man who authored 200 papers and two dozen books, but seeing was believing. Watching him on TV interacting with babies with patience, calm, and understanding made him an inspiration and role model for millions of anxious parents.

We spend too much time on people whose fame is based on egotistical preening, exhibitionism, greed, seeking and abusing power. Yet the world progresses and is worth inhabiting because of more admirable characters.

An amateur athlete who set records but thereafter spent a life of service and medical research. A genius with a debilitating disease of the body that didn’t prevent his mind from ranging widely and, even more impressively perhaps, preserving a sense of humor. An artist whose medium was cloth and canvas the human form and whose works were a glimpse of the ideal. A baby doctor who conveyed the happy news that these wee creatures are overflowing wth humanity, possibility, and capable of miraculous breakthroughs on a daily basis.

Bless all who run the race of life for the joy of competing, for the thrill of discovery, the quest for beauty, or the gift of understanding.