Who Elected Senator Thom Tillis?

Posted on by

Part of the peevishness of Podunk stems from the fact that we are aware of our lack of importance on the world’s great stage. We rarely produce presidents, titans of industry, cutting edge innovator, and if we do they move away. Nor do we wield economic or cultural power.

Once every few years, if there’s a contested primary, the caravan rolls through but soon is gone. Once in a while we send a major league embarrassment to Congress or figure in a notorious court case involving civil rights, environmental degradation, or gerrymandering, The rest is silence, except for ACC basketball.

But all of a sudden, the Junior Senator from the great state of North Carolina, Thom Tillis, has been sideswiped by history, earning him his fifteen minutes of infamy. Tillis was the Speaker of the NC House and as such the tool of the Art Pope machine, the local arm of the libertarian Koch cabal. As speaker his major accomplishment was to slash education spending in a state already 39th in the nation.

Then he ran for Senate in 2014 and was elected over Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan by 50,000 votes out of 2,915,000 cast. She led until the final weeks. What happened? A post mortem by “Roll Call” purported to explain how Tillis beat “One of 2014’s Best Campaign’s.” The answer was, by doing what yokels in Podunk do, outsourcing his campaign to the big city boys.

So Tillis, having been vetted by the machine, soon had a campaign well-funded and managed by the machine, including Crossroads GPS. It is Karl Rove’s dark money front allowing conservative donors to hide their identity. In 2014, it spent $26 million to elect Republicans in just six states.

As “Roll Call” reported, Tillis also got money from the Republican Party, desperate to gain the five seats needed to win control of the Senate. As the election neared, Obama’s poll numbers were down due to an Ebola scare and an Isis atrocity. Advertising for Tillis hung those issues around the neck of Hagan.

This account of the winning strategy is true, as far as it goes, but now we’ve begun to learn, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. The first hint that something was hinky came when Tillis, normally all but invisible, began to pop up in the news.

As senator his role has been largely to apologize for Trump’s incompetence and transgressions. When Trump said we should confiscate guns first and worry about due process later, Tillis said he didn’t believe “in my heart of hearts that’s exactly what he meant.” On other occasions he excused Trump craziness by saying he’s “not a legal scholar” or “was not really up to speed” on some policy. You think?

More interesting is his recent execution of the very rare double flip-flop. Last summer he tried to act like a purple state senator by co-sponsoring with Democrat Chris Coons a bill to codify Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s independence and immunity to firing.

In January, however, he backed off when real threats against Mueller began to emanate from the White House. Clearly Tillis didn’t want to be on the other side of a constitutional struggle from his President, his party, and his donors. But then a week or two ago, he flipped back and began pushing for the protection of Mueller again. Why?

Could it be because Tillis knew he was about to become news in a very dangerous way, as a beneficiary of the Russian-Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Bannon-Mercer, election-theft apparatus? He was suddenly anxious to look like he was all for Mueller getting to the bottom of things, rather than look like he was trying to cover up the fact that he was one more politician who owed his victory to a cabal of tech oligarchs, or Vladimir Putin.

Turns out the money behind his 2014 win came not just from the national Republican slush fund and the Crossroads dark money pit, but from the super PAC of John Bolton. He’s the foreign policy extremist who is about to become Trump’s NSC director. Or was, until the facts about his PAC became public. Bolton may now be in trouble, and Tillis is getting splashed with the mud.

Bolton’s PAC was largely funded by the anti-government billionaire Robert Mercer who also controlled the Steve Bannon-run Cambridge Analytica. It used an app devised by a Russian to weaponize Facebook data to tilt the 2016 election for Trump and against Clinton.

This nefarious scheme got its trial run in 2014 when, according to reporting by the “New York Times,” “using psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertising for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis.” Oops! So, the Bolton PAC, funded with Mercer money, hired the Mercer-owned Cambridge to get the Mercers (and possibly the Russians) the Senate they wanted.

If voters had known who was really manipulating the election, would they have cast the same votes? Without Bolton, Cambridge, Mercer, and Putin, would Trump be President? Would Tillis be Senator? And do we now know the full extent of the corruption? Or are we all in the same position as the cheated lover in the old Eddy Arnold song who lamented, “How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know?”

Alt-Wrong Roseanne

Posted on by

Once upon a time you could have a sitcom on TV about a blue collar family and politics, thank God, wouldn’t enter into the fun. The locus classicus is “The Honeymooners.” Though it aired in the mid-1950s at the height of the Red Scare, Cold War and burgeoning civil rights protests, the lives of Ralph, Alice, Ed and Trixie were unaffected by current events.

By twenty years later, Archie Bunker was a paragon of political incorrectness and the ongoing battle between him and his liberal son-in-law represented the era’s culture wars writ small — and funny. Fast forward to Roseanne’s return. Her first incarnation was more “The Honeymooners” than “All in the Family.”

This time, however, she has advertised her affinity for Trump, and he has followed his golden rule — “Say something nice about me, and I’ll say something nice about you.” So he phoned her to congratulate her after the premier, and crowed about her 18 million viewers on the stump, as if they were his. And possibly they are.

Republican pundits were quick to use the show’s popularity, especially in markets in Middle America, to cudgel Hollywood with. They claim the views and taste of all those red state people have been consistently treated with contempt or ignored and their moral sensitivities offended by the programers who preside over the Sodom and Gomorrah of the coasts.

Great talking points if they were true, but let’s not get carried away. First, it’s a ridiculous claim when the airwaves are full to overflowing with entire red state channels offering fare that includes “Duck Dynasty,“ Honey Boo-Boo, “Jersey Shore,” talent shows, reality shows, repulsive housewives from hither and yon, “Friday Night Lights,” country music awards, Nascar, and on and on.

Second, its entirely possible many people tuned into Roseanne’s return to gawk, but how many of the 18 million will stick with the show for episodes two through eight? Fewer, one would guess. Curiosity does not equate with approval.

Third, it is a lot easier to claim “Roseanne” as a conservatism-exalting comedy if you didn’t bother to watch the show. In fact, it seemed to make a pretty strong anti-Trump case. Yes, Roseanne, the character, says she voted for Trump because he’s going to make America great, but her liberal sister in the Meathead role seems to get the better of most of their exchanges.

And the situation of the Conner family is not exactly an advertisement for Trump’s America. The elders have to cut the pills subscribed by their doctors in half because their can’t afford to take the whole dose. Dan spends his time drinking out in the garage. Their daughter Darlene is a single mother who has been forced to move back home with her two children because she’s been laid off. Their other daughter Becky is underemployed and is thinking of renting her womb as a surrogate mother for enough money to afford a car, a down payment on a house, and an education. And one of the kids is bullied in school for being unusual, having an interest in fashion.

This is the kind of rainbow coalition family you might find in shows scorned as liberal, like “Here and Now” and “This Is Us.” And the Conner menage is also more an argument for the policies of Bernie Sanders than those of Trump. They ought to be voting for free tuition, improved public schools, universal healthcare, a living wage, easily accessible social services, respect for working class and minority Americans, getting big money out of politics and a tax system that addresses growing wealth inequality.

Finally, Roseanne herself, not the character she plays, makes a peculiar conservative poster girl. Yes, her origins are blue collar and she’s now a Trump supporter, but that doesn’t necessarily make her a conservative in the traditional sense. She’s spoken in favor of gay marriage, has behaved in ways usually described as feminist and is a devotee of the Kabbalah. It may be her affinity for Trump is more due to a shared enthusiasm for grabbing media attention by means of outrageous stunts and opinions. She recognizes a kindred spirit.

Who can forget her vulgar, comic rendition of the National Anthem that George H.W. Bush called “disgraceful,” her posing as Hitler, her tweeting the address of George Zimmermann to encourage vigilantism, her race for President on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket and for the nomination of the Green Party, and her floating the idea of running for Prime Minister of Israel?

Like Trump she has been frequently and flamboyantly married (she leads, four to three), and subscribes to lunatic, internet conspiracy theories, including the belief that the Mueller investigation is an attempt to distract attention from a pedophile ring run by Democratic members of Congress.

Though she, and the president, both pretend to be blue collar champions, they may actually represent another familiar American cliche — the spoiled nouveau riche nut job. It is a strange fact that some of the richest people in the America and the most economically stressed share an alt-right mindset, though often one group is selling the Kool-Aid and the other drinking it.

Roseanne can afford to dabble in blue collar rhetoric, but she is insulated from living the reality by her net worth, $80 million in her case, and the attorneys, accountants, and PR people money can buy. She doesn’t have to care about the actual lives, feelings or prospects of the kind of people she plays on TV. They didn’t escape the working class she came from. She did, and can cultivate her alt-right image and the macadamia nuts on her $2 Hawaiian plantation while they live hand to mouth, watching her network show because they can’t afford cable.

Deep Anti-State Skulduggery

Posted on by

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