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Nov. 24, 2020 - Straight White American Jesus
07:49
Anne Nelson on the Shadow Network Behind Trump's Coup, ACB's nomination, and the Coming Cold Civil War

Brad speaks with journalist Anne Nelson whose book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right outlines in vivid detail the network of organizations, media empires, and churches that sync the Radical Right. She explains how groups such as the NRA, Susan B. Anthony List, and Family Research Council are all interwoven into a nexus that both helped create the presidency of Donald Trump and will continue the takeover of the United States even after he's gone. For example, they created a website promoting ACB's nomination to the Supreme Court way back in 2015. They are the people behind Parler. And they are the largest voter mobilization vehicle in the country. If you want to understand how we got to Trump's soft coup and where we are headed next, this conversation is essential.  Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron To Donate: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi Venmo: @straightwhitejc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY
Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm joined today by Anne Nelson, who has been on our show before, as part of the Orange Wave series, but has been kind enough to return and enlighten us once again.
Anne is a journalist and actually so many other things.
For her work, has received a Livingston Award for Journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Historical Research, A Bellagio Fellowship for research on the social impact of digital media.
Graduate of Yale.
Began her career as a journalist in the United States and abroad.
Won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing in the conflict in Central America.
Taught at Columbia University in various capacities.
Has had an association with Bard College that we were just talking about.
And today we are talking once again about her incredible book, Shadow Network, Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
And Anne, first of all, thanks for coming back and thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
My pleasure, Matt.
I was just telling you before we started recording that one of the reasons I wanted to have you back is twofold.
I actually have two reasons for wanting to have you back.
One is I want folks to understand the network of donors, financiers, media moguls, parachurch ministries, megachurch pastors that are helping with Trump's sort of soft coup that he's staging at the moment.
But even beyond that, I want to get to the heart of your book, Shadow Network, and I want folks to understand that There has been no pause in the planning on the part of the Religious Right and the Shadow Network, the Council for National Policy and other organizations.
There's been no pause since the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Their levers are, they're pulling their levers, they're churning all the gears.
Things are in motion, and nothing has changed just because Harris and Biden won.
And so I really want folks to be able to understand that.
So here's my first question.
A lot of our attention right now has been sucked up by Trump's unwillingness to concede and all of these lost cause legal battles he's fighting.
But while we are looking towards that spectacle, the major levers of the religious right and the GOP political machine have been turning, as I just said.
In Shadow Network, in your book, you lay this out in, to me, the best detail there is.
I have not found another text or another place where this is laid out in such a detailed and clear way.
I know you do this all the time, Anne.
I know you swam in these waters for years, and you might be tired of it.
But would you mind just giving us a two-minute explainer on what is the Council for National Policy?
What are some of the organizations affiliated with it?
And why should we Why should that be something that we are aware of as we move forward in this political moment?
I'll try to do it concisely.
To start with, let's think about this period of history from the New Deal, from Roosevelt, through the Civil Rights Movement, and all of the reforms that changed our society over that period.
Civil rights, women's rights, social security, etc.
And this whole idea of a multicultural society with citizens' rights and responsibilities, for every action there's a reaction.
You had an organization formed in 1981, which was the Council for National Policy, made up of very conservative right-wing fundamentalist pastors, Major donors, many of them from the oil industry, and political operatives who had been annoyed at the way the Democrats kept winning elections and putting together coalitions that involved labor unions and feminists and civil rights advocates, etc.
And so they said, we're going to create a competitor to the Democrats' political operations, but we're going to do it in secret.
So a secret membership, secret meetings, and a long-term strategy that was all about networking.
One way that I explain it is to say that Democrats have an adversarial culture.
They have a lot of lawyers who like to argue with each other, and policy people who debate policy, and journalists who question and challenge.
So that is their culture.
It's very reactive.
The Council for National Policy and the radical right is like a corporate culture that has a command structure at the top, and then it has different divisions that follow the instructions and execute them.
So whereas the Democrats make these arguments to try to convince people, the Council for National Policy and its media partners and its strategists and its political allies Do what is the equivalent of advertising and unidirectional messaging that is coordinated what their big idea was
was that you have this aberration in the US political system that gives a lot of weight to sparsely populated states that still get two senators.
So the, you know, half a million people in Wyoming have two senators and so do the millions that live in California.
That's just how it was set up and that is a lever to power that they saw they could exploit.
They also saw that there were ways that they could go and manipulate the electoral college, and they also saw that if they had control of the Senate through this electoral structure that we have, They could have control over the judiciary.
So they've had this 40-year arc that culminated with the election of Trump in the White House and a Republican Senate and ramming through over 200 federal judges, right, that would rule in their favor on everything from gerrymandering to LGBT issues.
And in this way, they could take power in the United States And really leave the Democrats chasing their tails.
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