The Right’s Parallel Universe: Anne Nelson
August 24th, 2023
“Our future as a democracy will depend on how many people become strategic.”
Anne Nelson is an author and lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media, and human rights. Her most recent book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. We discuss the coordination between fundamentalist organizations and oil barons to win elections and pass socially conservative public policies.
Before the demise of local news, the American public had a factual common page. That is now largely displaced by right-wing media, especially on the radio. Right-wing media is unidirectional messaging, only expressing one point of view. This view is repeated on social media, radio, churches, and television, which creates a parallel universe that successfully turns out conservative voters. Conservative groups are also good at playing the long game on the ground, instead of parachuting into communities a few weeks before an election.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Anne Nelson
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis
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Anne Nelson Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] We're so excited to share that we've been officially nominated for a 2023 AAP Golden Crane Podcast Award. We're so honored to be in the running. Thank you all for listening every week, and thank you to the Asian American Podcasters Association for their consideration. The winners will be announced on August 30th, so stay tuned.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:27] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
There's a sense that American culture has slowly drifted rightwards over the past four decades or so, and that this is the root cause of the right leaning politics of today. And the popular perception is that this all happened all by itself somehow because the American people always skewed conservative anyway. But the reality is that there were strong forces at hand that brought about our current way of being. The slow incremental effects of voter suppression and gerrymandering, the chipping away at abortion rights over decades, the dominance of right-wing media and the ascendance of the now twice impeached former president and other MAGA politicians are by design.
To help us understand more clearly who the main players are and how they accomplish this, we're joined by Anne Nelson. She's an author and lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media, and human rights. Her most recent book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and The Secret Hub of the Radical Right, which investigates the web of fundamentalist organizations and oil barons and their mission to take over the levers of American government and beyond. She also writes for The Washington Spectator, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Anne, thank you for joining us.
Anne Nelson: [00:02:03] Thank you for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:04] So I thought we should begin with how you came to write this book. What started your curiosity, which ultimately culminated in this deeply researched work?
Anne Nelson: [00:02:15] Well, I think a lot of it has to do with my autobiography. I grew up in Nebraska and Oklahoma, but I came east to college, and I've lived in New York City for most of my adult life. But I've always traveled back to the Midwest. And since I left in the 1970s, I've watched this national divide grow and become not only deeper and wider, but also there's this great sense of misunderstanding between the coastal and urban populations of the United States and the people in the middle. And there are things that move a lot faster on the coasts and in cities, so women's rights, civil rights, LGBTQ plus rights, so on. These these are accepted and accelerated, and the rest of the country doesn't always have a chance to understand these movements or to catch up. And the problem is that that misunderstanding has been exploited by certain parties and has led to problems like the violent militias, the attempts to to overcome democratic processes and other crises that our country is facing right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:28] Hmm. Well, so. Let's talk about how they've been exploited, because one of the things that I thought was really interesting in the way that evangelicals have been, let's say, organized, to get them to become very reliable voters is that they have these really deep animating beliefs about Christian fundamentalism. And I'm thinking here -- you talk about this a lot in the book -- about biblical inerrancy, theocracy, and the belief in authoritarian principles. Can you explain to us what it is that makes them so passionate?
Anne Nelson: [00:04:07] Well, there are traditional strains of Protestantism and some strains of Catholicism that go in this direction. But I've always used the reality check of my childhood and youth in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where even the Southern Baptists, who were one of the more conservative denominations, were liberalizing. And as I point out in Shadow Network in the 60s and 70s, there was something called the conservative resurgence that undertook to purge the Southern Baptist Convention of the people who wanted to liberalize and modernize the denomination. And theologians and teachers and pastors were basically kicked out of the Southern Baptists, and others were were overcome, was something that became the model for the political purges of the Republican Party. So I don't know that you can look at the evangelicals or even the
fundamentalists as automatically authoritarian. They've been pushed in that direction by highly politicized forces.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:10] Actually, what I found surprising in the book is to read about the conservative resurgence, and that there was this toppling of the leaders, replacement of the leaders who even -- for example, the Southern Baptist Church came out in favor of Roe versus Wade, of abortion rights. When it was first decided. And so tell us about that takeover. How did they do it and how did it change the church?
Anne Nelson: [00:05:34] Well, if you go back and look at history and Nixon's dirty tricks, it was a lot of the same techniques. And that's not necessarily a coincidence when they gathered the Southern Baptists together for their convention. There were two leaders in particular; one of them a lawyer from Houston and the other a pastor from Dallas who figured out how to bus in voters, bussed them in to vote and then bussed them out, to really rig the elections within the church. It's kind of amazing. And of course, then you had all kinds of manipulations of the Texas Republican Party and spreading out to the Southern strategy that helped to bring Reagan to office. So what is interesting to me is that these people realized that they were losing influence within the broader population. It's not that the United States became more conservative. On the contrary, in terms of the demographics of our country, our population is skewing ever younger, more liberal, more ethnically and racially diverse. So they were losing their foothold in the power that's based in the kind of white, male patriarchal approach. And that's why they had to resort to these dirty tricks in order to seize power and overcome the popular will.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:01] Right. Well, you mentioned also how this is mirroring very closely the strategy of the Republican Party -- so within the Southern Baptist Church -- and this is around the same time that the Council for National Policy was founded. So, who are they? How did they come to be, and what were their goals?
Anne Nelson: [00:07:19] Well, the reason that the Southern Baptists and some of the televangelists were so urgently wanting these changes was because there were some changes to the tax reforms that said that if you ran a segregated school, that you were not eligible to be tax exempt under US law. And they had dealt with the integration of schools by founding what were called often segregation academies. Now, these schools
and their universities, which grew out of them, were hugely profitable, and they were very dismayed at the idea that they would have to start paying taxes on their operations. So they decided to come behind Ronald Reagan as their candidate. It was a little odd because here he was, he was a movie star. He was divorced. He made cigarette advertisements. He drank and smoked. So he wasn't really their kind of guy, but they thought that they had cut a deal with him. And they had this massive convention in Dallas, Texas, in this arena where all of these pastors came together, and he was given a script and he said, "I don't expect you to endorse me, but I endorse you." They asked him what book he'd take to a desert island. He said, the Bible. Which was what he had been instructed to say. So they got behind Reagan. Reagan won in 1980, and the Council for National Policy was formed in 1981 in the attempt to capitalize on this victory. Now, interestingly enough, Reagan was not following through on the deal that they thought he had cut with them. He compromised with Democrats. In some cases, he appointed some moderates to his cabinet. So over the next 40 years, the Council for National Policy and these evangelical ministers and televangelists, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, these people were in the very beginnings of the organization. They joined forces with oil industry personalities, people who were from the fossil fuels industry, to try to engineer elections to favor them. And the trade off was that the fundamentalists would get conservative social policies. So they would be draconian policies against abortion that you're seeing playing out now, where women with failed pregnancies are in danger of dying because doctors are afraid to give them procedures, anti LGBTQ policies, cruel policies against trans people that you see playing out now. But what I believe was driving more of it was the money. And under their favored candidate, Donald Trump, they got the most regressive tax package in our lifetimes. So what you see is corporations and wealthy individuals benefiting and paying, in some cases, no tax at all, while the tax burden is being shifted to the lower 50% of the population. So that is what they wanted. They felt entitled to the riches of this country and the fruits of everyone else's labor. And the fundamentalists felt entitled to govern other people's lives.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:38] Yeah, well. What was interesting is when you trace this history of Southern Baptists, evangelicals writ large and Republicans joining hands. And their initial disappointment in Reagan because he wasn't as reactionary as they wanted him to be. Nonetheless, they figured out a way to be an organizing powerhouse for electoral victories. You actually write in the book that, "Evangelicals are the unions of the
Republican Party." So what was the moment where they decided to really work together beyond Reagan and overcome this disappointment and keep going at it?
Anne Nelson: [00:11:20] Well, the Council for National Policy was founded in 1981, and this coalition kept evolving. They held secret meetings 2 or 3 times a year forever, and the membership was secret. The proceedings of the meetings were secret, and over time they formed little power circles in Washington. They had strategists like Paul Weyrich. He was one of the central organizers is Richard Viguerie, who really invented direct mail for political marketing. And you had Morton Blackwell, the founder of the Leadership Institute, which undertook to train literally hundreds of thousands of right wing candidates and campaign workers. So really, in every election, they would decide where to throw their weight and then they'd go to see which candidate, always Republican, was going to follow through on what they felt were their commitments. And I would like to specify that I do not speak of either evangelicals or fundamentalists generically. You've got liberal Democrat evangelicals, you've got centrist moderates, and then you've got the right wing. And a lot of what distinguishes them is what media they consume. If they're watching Fox News and they get their news from Breitbart and live inside their Facebook bubbles, they're pretty easily manipulated into voting for right wing candidates regardless of the platforms or how their own lives are affected. And even with the fundamentalists who have a closer literal relationship with the Bible, you've got something like the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which pulled away from the extremism of the Southern Baptist Convention. So you've got a lot of gradations here. And it's important to realize for all Americans that we should not label any member of any group automatically, because these gradations have a very important political role to play.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:22] Right. Well, let's talk about the media that they consume since you just touched on that, obviously this conversation would not be complete without talking about right wing media and the entire spectrum, you know, that it covers. Obviously, the media landscape has changed dramatically since the Fairness Doctrine was undone and cable network and the decimation of local news, of course, plays very heavily into this. So since most of us in New York City don't consume as much of it, except for perhaps Fox News, but there's a very healthy, robust radio industry. So what is being said there that we should know about? Because I think we just don't have an idea.
Anne Nelson: [00:14:05] Yeah. One of the struggles I've had in talking about this book is that so many people on the coast say, "Oh, radio is over. It's so retro." And I think that if you live a life in New York City where you're on the subway, you don't recognize how powerful radio is for people who are driving cars sometimes for hours every day. And this was the real foothold of the Council for National Policy Media. Two of the early members were also the founders of Salem Media. And it's surprising to me how few people have heard of Salem Media because it's one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the country. It started out with two Southerners who moved to California and they started broadcasting religious services and then country music, and they built it out into a highly successful chain of radio stations that they owned and realized that they could combine religious broadcasting with right wing talk broadcasting and gradually build up a political constituency with these radio broadcasts. And as they did this with Salem Media simultaneously, you had the Christian Broadcasting Networks, which were also affiliated through people like Pat Robertson with the Council for National Policy. And then as you move into our era, these organizations, especially Salem, started building and acquiring digital platforms like PJ Media, like RedState, and so on. So then you have this multiplier effect where their radio programs are going out to 3000 stations. They're syndicated. And they're coordinated, heavily coordinated, with the Christian broadcasting and with the digital platforms. So what does that mean? I came across this when I was in Oklahoma visiting family and driving, and turned on the radio, and heard one of these radio programs. And at the time, if you go back into the early 2000s, there was a preacher who was saying that if John Kerry became president and you had same sex marriage, it would make traditional marriage illegitimate. And people were calling in in a total panic because they're like, I've been married for 40 years and I won't be married to my husband anymore. And and it was just pure disinformation that was very mean-spirited and false. Years later, I heard them say that the reason you couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton was because she was a demon. I also heard that Beto O'Rourke was the son of Satan. And what I always say is, how do you fact check that? Right? But these people don't worry about fact checking. And in fact, they work very closely with people at the Leadership Institute and other partners to craft branding and labeling and framing that will touch nerves. So one example that I cite in my book is that they came up with the label of partial birth abortion. Now, this does not exist in medicine. It is not an actual term that anyone applies. But it is such a horrific image that if you say to people, Democrats believe in partial birth abortion, then they're
going to react emotionally. And that's that's the purpose. So then they they segued from partial birth abortion to birth day abortion on demand. Now, both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have used that language crafted by this movement to imply that Democrats think that a woman can be nine months pregnant with a healthy baby and walk in and say, I changed my mind, give me an abortion. This is utterly, totally false. It doesn't exist. But if that's what you see in church, inserted in your church bulletin, and you drive home and it's on your radio and you go home and go online and it's in all of your Facebook, digital media, and social media, you believe it. And add to that, as you mentioned, the collapse of local journalism, where the newspapers and the radio stations and in many cases the television stations that were reporting actual professional journalism have disappeared over the last 20 years. So you have not only Fox, but you have Sinclair stations echoing this disinformation and an ecosystem that includes Breitbart and many other platforms. So in some ways, I really sympathize with these people because if you're surrounded by the information, that is what you're going to believe, right?
Mila Atmos: [00:18:50] Right. I was actually having a conversation today about this parallel universe, and he said, you know, it's not that they're hypocrites. They are true believers. You know, they really believe this. In fact, one of the big takeaways from reading your work is that for these believers, this is an existential fight between good and evil. Like you said, you know, they think that Hillary Clinton is a demon; like they really believe that. And so they're really organized and really motivated. And in fact, they say that not voting is a sin. Tell us a little bit about how churches get out the vote for them.
Anne Nelson: [00:19:31] I'd like to touch on something you just mentioned, because when they're involved with this media, it's very compelling for them. And another thing that these organizations do is organize pastors. For example, one of the core organizations for the Council for National Policy is called the Family Research Council, and they have a pastor's organization where they write the sermons for the pastors. You just download them and deliver them. It saves you all that work and you're delivering their political point of view. But they also have ways of raiding the church directories and cross-referencing with voter files so they know who in a congregation is likely to vote Republican or Democrat. And then they organize voter registration and even trips to the polls on Election Day so that they marshal these votes. And they're very astute about identifying critical districts. So, for example, a lot of Democrats are very focused on the
national media and what people are saying in New York and Los Angeles and Washington, DC. That's the national arena. But if you look at the last few elections, there are swing states that are not in those areas where the differential in an election can be as few as 10 or 12,000 votes. So they're much more powerful in addressing the swing states. They invest a tremendous amount. I do fault the national news media because when you started having the die off of local newspapers through the loss of advertising to the Internet and other forces, a lot of my colleagues in New York journalism, the major media were like, "Oh, it's fine, because we'll just multiply the subscribers to The New York Times." And they have a fundamental lack of understanding of the role that the media plays in the community. My premise is that when you're in a small town like the one where I grew up, you get the hometown newspaper primarily to look at the scores in your high school basketball team where your kid is playing and to see who got married and who died. You know, it is hyper local. And because in the past, these same newspapers had the front pages with national news services from the Associated Press and so on, people got factual news by osmosis. It's not because they were running out to read The New York Times syndicate. They were not. They were looking at the basketball scores, but they were pretty much on the same page in terms of information with the rest of the nation. Right. And it's not that they agreed about everything. You could say, I'm for the Vietnam War, I'm against the Vietnam War. But most people believed that such and such a battle took place on such and such a date. Right. Or that this candidate said this and that candidate said that, Right. We had a factual common page. And that's that's what's gone. And if I were in charge, whether it was through Congress -- different Congress than we have now, of course -- or a major donor, I would invest heavily in professional journalism that speaks to local communities in these states. That's what they're missing. And it's not entirely their fault because the nation as a whole didn't want to invest in them.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:01] Right. Right. Well, there are some experimentation happening with that in New Jersey and in California, but it's not nationwide. And it really needs to have more funding. And we need to actually, I think, as everyday people, demand it.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:17] We are taking a quick break to share about a fellow Democracy Group podcast that we think you'll enjoy. And when we come back, we talk about fundamentalist actors creating a parallel universe, which is ground zero for conquering and dividing us. But first: Democracy Paradox is yet another podcast about, you
guessed it, democracy. But what makes it different is that it tackles extremely complex ideas without arrogance or condescension. You can count on Democracy Paradox to open up new ways to consider politics and world affairs through the insights of world class researchers and scholars. Go to democracyparadox.com to listen now or look for it on your favorite podcast app.
And now let's return to my conversation with Anne Nelson.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:15] You were just talking about the fact that we had a shared reality because we all at least consumed the same news as fact or the same facts as news, I should say. So what the CNP and a lot of these fundamentalist actors successfully did was create a parallel universe between their giant churches, their evangelical colleges, and, of course, their extensive media network. I think people who are not part of that universe don't have a concept of the scale. Can you tell us about, like, how many millions of people take this in? Because I think this is what people just don't comprehend.
Anne Nelson: [00:24:57] Well, I don't know how to count how many millions, but it definitely is in the millions. And it's especially prevalent in states that are political battleground states. But I'll give you one way of thinking about it. If you look at the research of people like Dr. Peter Hotez, who's an expert on Covid and vaccines, he's recently published a book about Covid disinformation. And the estimates are that people who've died from Covid disinformation are in the hundreds of thousands. The most conservative is only 200,000, but some of them go higher than that. And the right wing media disinformation system has been the primary driver of these deaths. As you can tell, it makes me angry. They have been discouraging people from getting Covid vaccines. They have told people that Ivermectin is a cure for Covid. It is not. And the ethical doctors I work with tell me that they have patients coming into the emergency rooms with Covid and their dying words are, "can I have the vaccine now?" So they've done a tremendous amount of damage. And one of the primary spokespeople for this disinformation platform is a CNP member, Dr. Simone Gold, who was convicted for her role in the January 6th incursion into the Capitol, but has been somebody who who has really been responsible for an immense amount of damage and has organized groups of unethical physicians to spread this disinformation.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:40] Right. So this disinformation doesn't only infect our mainstream culture in terms of the way that we talk about things, for example, partial birth abortions, but also it literally kills people.
Anne Nelson: [00:26:52] It infects us directly.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:54] Yes.
Anne Nelson: [00:26:54] And you know, I wrote a piece about how this was assembled for the benefit of the Trump campaign that was published in The Washington Spectator, where I just map it out step by step with links to the media that they used. And when Simone Gold organized her big event in Washington, DC, the press conference went viral, and you can see how many millions of people were were reached just through that environment. Now you have other bad actors like Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA. He's also a member of the Council for National Policy, and she appeared on his show. She was covered by Breitbart. She was covered by Fox Christian Broadcasting Network. So what you see is this replication across platforms. And often it's not just the same message, it's the same spokespeople using identical language. You don't have that anywhere else in our media system, right? I mean, for example, if you look at scientific reporting, you won't have Scientific American having exactly the same wording as Medpage and other medical publications. It's regarded as unprofessional. So that's why you have journalism on one side which attempts to be factual and is often successful. What I call what the right wing media does is closer to marketing and propaganda because it's unidirectional messaging. That means you never have somebody expressing the other side. The other point of view, you never have somebody on that disagrees with what you're putting out. But what they do for unsophisticated audiences is have somebody in a suit and tie sitting behind a desk with chyrons as though they're a news anchor and putting forth this disinformation as though it's fact.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:43] Right. Well, we had George Lakoff on the show a while back, but he reminded us, of course, that we should never take on the opposition's frame and repeat them to debunk them. We should always, like you said, basically speak in one direction, always speak our frame and always speak it with conviction. In fact, I think that's one of the things that the right does so well. They speak about their beliefs with
conviction. When I think about Brexit, that's what was so exciting for people. They were like, These people really believe it. It's going to happen! It's going to be this miracle cure. But but obviously it's not.
Anne Nelson: [00:29:18] I taught for seven years at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which is a very well known institution. And in terms of the practice of journalism, you feel obligated to represent the other side. You're supposed to pose a question and be as open as possible to both sides and be capable of changing your mind. If the facts don't support your premise, then you better change your premise. So that's why it's such an unequal playing field. Most of the Democrats and the urban populations I'm talking about, educated voters really are interested in facts and that can't compete with people who are getting this unidirectional messaging, telling them what to think.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:03] Yeah, it's very tricky. So I have a question about more recent events. You talked about Simone Gold being convicted about her role in January 6th. And of course, these forces, the CNP have been at work for 40 years plus and they have continually adapted to achieve their outcomes. So in light of the Biden victory in 2020, the failed January 6th insurrection, and the numerous indictments of the former president, how have they changed their tactics -- if they have?
Anne Nelson: [00:30:35] They're very adaptable. And I would say that they play the long game that is a source of their influence. So one thing that people might expect from them is a kind of loyalty. And because they cut a deal with Trump and Trump was the candidate that actually honored his commitment right when when they threw their weight behind Trump in June of 2016, they said, we'll give you a war chest, we'll give you our canvassers, we'll give you our strategists. Now, he had none of these. He had kind of appeared from his television career as a front runner in the primaries. But he was a very weak candidate who was not really taken seriously without these elements for his campaign. And what they demanded in return was the ability to give him the list for federal judges to choose from. And he complied with that, which gave us the Supreme Court we have now. And they asked him for the ability to define certain Republican social policies, which is how you had very strict, anti-trans and anti abortion policies, all kinds of anti LGBT policies that that appeared in the Republican platform that was written by these people. And he also said we want to be your spiritual advisory
committee. So here's Trump. And he was even more extreme than Reagan. I mean, he had a very difficult time talking about the Bible because he apparently had no knowledge of it whatsoever. But he suddenly appeared with this spiritual advisory committee. Now, Obama had had a spiritual advisory committee that included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslim. Trump's was all evangelical. So it was very uniform. It was in no way reflective of American society or the spiritual makeup of our population. But that's what he gave them as his deal. You know, and Trump is a deal maker. However, what you have now is they recognize that Trump has some really serious weaknesses as a candidate, even though he is in terms of polling the front runner. But he's got these various lawsuits hanging over him, various charges. So so they're examining their options. Now, Mike Pence has been a longtime affiliate of the Council for National Policy, and recently he announced that he is now a member of the Council for National Policy. So they've always liked Mike Pence. They're not sure that he can win. So they've been kind of inviting these different candidates, including Ron DeSantis, to their events, looking them over, and seeing how far they will go in supporting their policies. Now you can see DeSantis's movements to the right, including in ways that are damaging to the state of Florida. His actions in terms of Disney and LGBT people. These are not helping the Florida economy or the social environment in any way. This is crowd pleasing for this crowd. So they're they're holding their beauty contests these days and in coming months. But the other thing that they do very well is go into critical districts a year, year and a half in advance. And the Leadership Institute will set up shop to start recruiting and training local candidates and campaign workers and really sowing the seeds for the elections to come. I did a survey of some counties in Texas over a year ago, and well like a year in advance of the next election, they were active in between 40 and 50 counties in Texas. And on the other hand, the Democrats tend to parachute in a few weeks before an election and send some college kids to knock on doors. And they don't have the deep canvassing and the integration into the churches and the schools and the other institutions. So they have created a substantial advantage in a lot of local elections.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:51] Yeah, there are very, very good at the ground game. And like you said, they play, also in addition to that, the long game. Actually, one of the things that I thought was very interesting was how much they invested in young people.
Anne Nelson: [00:35:05] That's been a big emphasis for them. And it comes again at a time where the Democrats have really fallen down. When I was on my book tour, I went to the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, which used to be real laboratories for political activism back in the day. And there were young Republican clubs, but there didn't seem to be any substantial Democratic organization or attempt to organize students, so they were politically inactive. Most students at public universities tend to vote Democratic. So the Council for National Policy and its partners have tried to suppress polling places on college campuses, for these campuses--the big public universities--but not for the small evangelical colleges that skew Republican. So I would say that one of their superpowers is being able to look at these micro slices of the American electorate and design strategies for each one that are highly particular.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:13] Mm hmm Yeah, they do that really well. I want to pivot here to American exceptionalism because this idea that America is exceptional, that the American people are the chosen people, really feeds into Christian fundamentalism. And it almost feels like believing in American exceptionalism lends credence to more fundamentalist beliefs. How do you think about that? How does it all fit in?
Anne Nelson: [00:36:38] Well, for my sins, I've had to read an awful lot of the literature they produce. There is an emphasis on a kind of authoritarian perspective. So the idea that is promulgated by people like their favorite faux historian, David Barton, is that God created the United States as a Christian nation. And just as you have to believe every word of the Bible because of biblical inerrancy, and it was dictated by God directly, I don't know to whom the Constitution cannot be challenged because it is without flaw. And that you have biblical inerrancy and constitutional originalism joined at the hip in their thinking. But the thing that vexes me about this is that I don't know if they've read either the Bible or the Constitution. You can go to your Bible and find that if your daughter commits adultery, you should put her on your doorstep, gather the neighbors and stone her to death. Now, if the Bible is without flaw and you have to obey everything it says, you'd have an awful lot of stonings going on these days, including the daughters of fundamentalists, I assure you. Now, obviously, whoever wrote that was speaking from someplace in the desert several thousand years ago, and it was probably something that people believed in that time and place, and has no relevance to modern life and shouldn't. By the same token, if you go into the Constitution, you can see many things that have changed. We believe that women should be able to vote. We believe
that African-Americans are an entire person, not 3/5 of a person, as one of the amendments states. So there are things that have changed and have advanced. And one way that I talk about it is I say, you know, okay, we have a ship of state that was designed by the Constitution in 1789, but over 250 years, a ship can get a little leaky and need some renovation. That's what we need to do. And just as modern life has changed and God has brought more benefits to broader populations, our system of government has to, as well.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:03] Mm hmm. Well, so speaking of that, we are a hopeful podcast. I'm wondering what pro-democracy efforts that you have seen in recent years that you feel are really making progress, that are really bringing us, you know, into this present state of the modern life and the modern society?
Anne Nelson: [00:39:22] Well, I'm very impressed by valiant efforts in terms of local media coverage. There is something called the Public News Service, which deserves a lot of support. They really work hard to help support local news coverage that I'm talking about. And they make their journalism available to local radio stations. They do a terrific job. And, you know, one of the things that I like about them is that they know how to make the news local. So rather than preaching at people about the environment, they'll go in and report about contaminated water supplies by your kid's elementary school. They make it real and direct for ordinary people, and we need a lot more of that. There are other radio initiatives going on in other parts of the country. There's one in Wisconsin that's good. I think in terms of political activism, what you need to have is more attention and more money invested in critical states way earlier. So if you look at the last couple of presidential elections, you've got a small handful of swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia. If you had those seven states, you would win the national election in both of these cases. And you can tell with Georgia how hard Trump fought to overturn the results of the Georgia election and how critical that was. You cannot neglect these places. You can't neglect districts like Omaha, Nebraska, which is Nebraska District one and often goes Democrat. It's in Nebraska. Who cares about Nebraska? Well, if you're looking at the balance in the house, everybody needs to care about Nebraska. You also can't get complacent. New York is a Democratic state. Yes, but five of the New York districts, congressional districts, went Republican. And by the way, that's what gave the Republicans the House of Representatives and our rule under Kevin McCarthy and the
problems with the debt ceiling limit and various other ways of blocking Biden's more reasonable agendas. So it takes looking beyond your New York Times, and expecting The New York Times to give you all the news you need, and give everybody the news they need. Because I can tell you, people in Arkansas don't really care what the best bagel in Queens is. They've got their own local concerns and they deserve to have coverage of those concerns in their language according to their values. If you could fix that, you'd get a long ways in terms of political organizations. There is one called the American Values Coalition that attempts to break through the disinformation that is distributed to evangelical groups in swing states and works with pastors to help them pull their congregations back from QAnon and other bad actors. Very interesting work is done by a group called Swing Left, which tries to match people from urban areas and coastal areas to other states. So there are various groups that exist, and I think that an awful lot of our future as a democracy will depend on how many people become strategic, right?
Mila Atmos: [00:42:59] Yes. Yes. Well, so if you are an everyday person, what are two things I could be doing to be strategic?
Anne Nelson: [00:43:06] Well, first of all, study the electoral map. And for example, Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia has a very good website called The Crystal Ball that just talks about state level races. And so rather than being transfixed by the horse race of the presidential campaign as though Congress didn't exist, and the Electoral College didn't exist, and so on, really doing homework. That is one thing, understanding how our system works because it's pretty complicated. And it is not one man, one vote, or one person, one vote. Never has been. And that's one way people get deluded, you know, because, hey, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. So what? She didn't become president. The other thing is to run for office and to support reasonable candidates at every level. The Council for National Policy and its partners have pushed very hard on school boards and local precincts, and they've been training people in how to disrupt school boards. They have online training from the Leadership Institute and the Family Research Council, and they're sending people into these communities and teaching them how to attack the school board members and run against them in a very antagonistic and sometimes violent way to attack administrators, to attack these dedicated teachers who are working for low salaries, long hours, and great commitment. And all of a sudden they're coming under attack from these people for trying to do their
job and take care of these kids. People who care about public schools and public life need to get organized and respond. This has started to come along in certain communities, but most communities aren't prepared for this. They expect that the school board to take care of things like, Oh, let's deal with the budget, let's renovate the cafeteria. Maybe we'll talk about how to teach math. They don't expect these virulent, vicious attacks on on teachers and administrators. And that's where you get this language about critical race theory, which is totally misleading. Now you're getting this hateful, hateful, anti-trans campaign going on that is hurting children and hurting youth. This is like the first line of democracy where, you know, we didn't expect to be coming under attack on a school board level. But what they're trying to do -- and it's the same thing that you have with the Covid disinformation -- is to sow distrust in our public institutions. The message that is underlying all of this is you can't trust the government, you can't trust the CDC, you can't trust public schools. You can't trust journalists. You can't trust universities. And that is their way of trying to erode our society.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:14] Yeah, it's poisoning the well all over. Everywhere. Anne Nelson: [00:46:18] And we all have to drink from it.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:19] Yes. Yes, we do. I think... Well, what you said is right. Of course we should endeavor to get involved. And that's that's our number one motto over here at Future hindsight is to build your civic action toolkit and use it, and get in there. So as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Anne Nelson: [00:46:44] What makes me hopeful tends to be the young people that I work with. I'm a research scholar at Columbia University, and there are students there that are very smart, very energetic. There's a whole population of young military veterans who have come into Columbia who are asking questions and working hard. And in fact, there are people like Ken Harbaugh, who's a veteran who has an excellent podcast called Burn the Boats. So you have people working on thousands of different fronts. And I think that if we could just go the extra mile in networking these efforts and helping them leverage each other, we could be much more effective. Now, time is short. You know, we said that the 2020 election would be existential. It was, but it was not a victory. It was a reprieve. It bought us some time because a second Trump
administration would have been utterly and completely disastrous. I think it would have ended democracy as we know it. But 2024 is coming up and a lot of the same issues will be on the table. And as I said, the Council for National Policy and the Leadership Institute have been in the field working for years. We've got 18 months. Less. Less than that. To really reach our fellow Americans and have a national conversation about what our national values are. And I do believe in the goodness of people. I do believe people care about their children and about their neighbor's children, and that if you only find ways for them to detect the lies and really connect with their core values, that we can get back to a reasonable course.
Mila Atmos: [00:48:38] Yeah, that is very hopeful. I mean, I think a lot of people have caught on and are interested in finding out the truth and finding out how they can make sure that democracy can survive in this country, even if it may sometimes look like we are still at great risk in 2024. And we are. But I think you're right that people are curious, are asking questions in a way that maybe they didn't ten years ago.
Anne Nelson: [00:49:07] But I think it also takes a meaningful connection. And that means journalists not just parachuting into communities and, you know, sitting in a coffee shop for a day. It means having more of this conversation taking place in depth and really listening to each other and realizing that there are motivations here. You know, when people on the right who have been lied to -- talk about abortion and birth day abortion -- that comes from a caring for children. Now because they're being lied to, they're opposing something that doesn't exist. Right. But it's also a way of manipulating their vote. So how do you connect with them and say, look, we care about children, too. Let's talk about how to care for children. Let's talk about how to care for pregnant mothers. Let's come up with common solutions rather than just insulting each other and treating each other as alien voices.
Mila Atmos: [00:50:08] Hear. Hear. I totally agree with you. It's hard, though. Anne Nelson: [00:50:12] It is hard.
Mila Atmos: [00:50:13] It's hard. But I agree we need to have these conversations instead of talking past each other and insulting each other. So Anne, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Anne Nelson: [00:50:24] Well, thank you so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:50:26] Anne Nelson is a researcher at Columbia University and the
author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we are revisiting one of my all-time favorite episodes with Kurt Andersen from 2021. He's a prolific writer and author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, a Recent History. We discussed the conservative playbook to move our society culturally, economically, and politically to the right, and why continuous civic engagement and investment in Americans can restore basic fairness.
Kurt Andersen: [00:51:10] It was so much about norms, that had changed, rather than laws, where big businesses were suddenly given the green light to say, "No, we don't know anything to our employees as we used to. We don't have to offer them affordable health care. We don't have to give them fixed pensions like we did." This new right leaning, right wing economic paradigm was suddenly the one that had replaced the New Deal. I call it the Raw Deal.
Mila Atmos: [00:51:39] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Seriously, we do. And actually, quite a lot of people listen to the show there. If that's you. Hello. If not, you'll find punchy episode clips, full interviews, and more. Subscribe at YouTube.com/FutureHindsight.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged! Democracy Group: [00:52:14] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.