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