How We Got Here
This past year, what feels like a hundred in Trump years, Gaslit Nation listeners have asked the same question: How did we get here? The answer, though deeply unsettling, is vital to understand. It's the story of a 40-year campaign waged by far-right Christian nationalists, Big Oil, and corporate power to undermine our democracy.
To help us all make sense of this crisis moment, as a firehose of corruption and racist disinformation blasts from the White House, we’ve created a special “Best of Gaslit Nation” episode. This powerful montage connects the dots with help from some of the most tenacious experts sounding the alarm.
You’ll hear from Ari Berman of Mother Jones and author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It; Anne Nelson, author of The Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right; Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, Elie Mystal of The Nation and author of Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, and more. Each voice reveals a piece of the puzzle: how the Reagan revolution, Supreme Court corruption, and dark money led us to this breaking point, unleashing Trump as their Frankenstein monster.
But this isn’t just about history: it’s about action. The Gaslit Nation Action Guide is your toolkit for resisting, rebuilding, and reclaiming our democracy. The darkness we face cannot withstand our collective light.
So stand up. Be defiant. Shine bright. This chapter isn’t the end: it’s our call to build something better, together.
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Two special events! This Thursday May 29 at 8pm ET, the Media and Democracy Forum will host Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes to discuss editorial cartooning’s role in democracy, press freedom, and 2025’s controversy involving her rejected cartoon by Washington Post editor David Shipley. RSVP here: https://www.mobilize.us/mediademocracyproject/event/768371/
June 16 at 4pm ET, Keira Havens of Citizens' Impeachment joins the Gaslit Nation salon to discuss the growing movement to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump and why it matters. Look out for a Zoom link on Patreon the morning of the event, and be sure to visit citizensimpeachment.com.
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Featured Episodes:
Minority Rule, featuring Ari Berman https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2024/4/23/minority-rule
Voter Suppression Emergency: The Ari Berman Interview https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2021/6/24/voter-suppression-emergency-the-ari-berman-interview
The World Must Stand Up to Trump’s America, featuring Elie Mystal https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2025/2/11/the-world-must-stand-up-to-trumps-america?rq=elie%20mystal
Bad Faith, featuring filmmaker Stephen Ujlaki https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2024/4/16/bad-faith
Democracy in Chains: The Nancy MacLean Interview - Part I https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2022/6/1/nancy-maclean-interview-part-01
Can the Reagan Revolution Be Undone?, featuring Jesse Eisinger https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2023/12/13/reagan-revolution-jesse-eisinger-part-2
Project 2025 Super Special, featuring Anne Nelson https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2024/5/21/project-2025-super-specialnbsp
EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:
June 16 4pm ET – Keira Havens of Citizens Impeachment joins Gaslit Nation to discuss the Trump impeachment movement; details at citizensimpeachment.com.
June 30pm ET – Book club discussion of Lillian Faderman’s The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
Andrea Chalupa (00:10):
Hey everyone, it's Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation in our Monday Gaslit Nation salons listeners, over the last year, a hundred years in Trump, years have asked How did we get here? And of course, we all know, but it's just a nice grounding exercise to talk about the 40 year far right Christian nationalists, big oil coup against our democracy. So I decided to put together a montage of episodes walking you through the history of how America is now in this crisis point of normalization, normalization, where people are just living their lives and every day fascism is happening, spewing from the White House. Donald Trump is the Frankenstein monster of a coalition of forces that have been chipping away, chipping away at our democracy. And here to walk us through it is a best of Gaslit nation. You're going to hear from the investigative journalist Ari Berman of Mother Jones and Nelson, the author of the Shadow Network historian, Nancy McLean, the author of Democracy in Chains, Ellie Misal of the Nation, the Justice Correspondent, and you're going to hear from the director of the must-watch documentary, Bad Faith based on Ann Nelson's book, the Shadow Network, Stephen Ujlaki, and of course Jesse Eisinger, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist at ProPublica who led their extremely important investigations into corruption on the Supreme Court.
(02:04):
You're going to hear from him too on how the Reagan revolution plays into all this. So I love this episode. It really pulls everything together. If you want a link to all of the original interviews featured here, go to the show notes and as always, we have the power fight back. Stand up, be defiant, and shine your light because if there's one thing, the darkness of the ghouls cannot stand. It is our collective light and you have it in you. We all have it in you. America was built by authoritarianism. It has been a long history of authoritarianism for non-white people in this country and women we are fighting our way out of it. This is just the latest chapter and we are going to fight and build greater progress for everyone together. And if you want to know how, go to the Gaslit Nation Action guide link two at the top of the show for this episode available at gaslitnationpod.com. Keep fighting everyone and stay shining bright.
Ari Berman (03:09):
The fascinating thing is if you go back and look at the constitutional debates, there was a lot of debate about these institutions themselves, and there was a lot of compromises that the founders made. So it wasn't like there was unanimity on these things. They were aware in many cases that where they were making compromises that a lot of them weren't crazy about. So take the Senate for example, the idea that each state should have two senators, the same number of senators. That was something that a lot of the framers opposed James Madison, who's thought of as the father of the Constitution. He was extremely opposed to this idea because he thought that it would allow a minority of states to thwart the will of a much larger majority of states, which of course is what has happened in the US Senate. He signed off in it because he wanted the Constitution to be ratified, but he wasn't happy about the fact that each state had the same number of senators.
(03:58):
Same with the presidency. There were framers that argued that the president should be directly elected by the people even back in 1787 that was argued and a lot of arguments were made against it. They thought that the people would be duped or they weren't informed enough to make a decision or that it wouldn't give enough protection for the small states or the slave states. But that was debated at the time. The electoral college wasn't something that the framers had planned all along. It was basically like we don't want the president to be directly elected by the people, so let's come up with some crazy complicated alternative instead. So there were these tensions even back in 1787 between democratic and anti-democratic forces. What we see over and over again is that the constitution that was created was a product of these compromises, and often what happened is the compromises would favor smaller states or would favor slave states, or it would favor wealthy white property owners. So over and over, these privileged minorities were getting preferential treatment in ways that would hurt this much larger and more diverse majority. And I think that's what sparked and laid the groundwork for minority rule to become a reality across the US society and across the US history.
Andrea Chalupa (05:17):
Now, let's fast forward to Wisconsin in recent history and how key swing states electoral college have become these laboratories for autocracy of minority rule.
Ari Berman (05:31):
Yeah, so we're fast forwarding many years from the founding. It's basically the kind of same idea that this essentially powerful conservative white minority would rule and would rule a state in Wisconsin that was known for being a laboratory for progressive reform was a place that gave birth to labor unions and the first programs for social security and all of these different kind of reforms. It was captured by the conservative right after the 2010 election. This didn't just happen in Wisconsin, it happened in a lot of other key swing states as well, backed up by a lot of dark money. The idea was there was a whole project within the Republican party both to take back these states in reaction to Barack Obama's election and then to draw new districts that would then enshrine Republican rule for the next decade and beyond. And Wisconsin became the laboratory for this strategy.
(06:27):
And the idea was you take away all the democratic rights essentially that would allow you to be ousted from office. So they went after labor unions very early on because that was the main arm of the Democratic party and the progressive movement. They passed new restrictions on voting to make it harder for democratic constituencies to be able to organize and cast ballots. They gerrymandered so that it would be very difficult to ever oust the Republicans who are passing these unpopular policies from office. And it was basically an example of how a state could move from majority rule to minority rule. And it was the national model. They felt like if we could do this in Wisconsin, which is this state that was known for good government politics, for democratic reform, if we can do it in Wisconsin, then we can export it all across the country. And while the Democrats control the federal government, we're going to make the states the laboratory for autocracy that we replicate in state after state, after state.
Elie Mystal (07:29):
While I do think that Joe Biden gets credit for some of his policies and programs that were generally very good, they failed at their one job because they didn't even understand what the job was. That is a huge reason why we're here, right? The second reason you already brought up voting rights. The second job, if you were going to have two jobs, then the second job would've been to secure voting rights to roll back the voting rights restrictions implemented by John Roberts starting in 2013 understand people that the Republican response to the first black president in the first instance was to restrict voting rights, to understand that black people had gotten to the point where they had so much political power that we could even have a black president. The first thing they did was take away and restrict voting rights to make it harder for black people to vote, thus making it harder for there ever to be another Barack Obama.
(08:28):
That was their first plan. And it's that plan fundamentally that led to Trump in the first place, voter suppression, voter depression, leading to Trump in the first place in 2016. So again, if you're the Biden administration, job one, make sure that Trump can't run again. Job two, make sure that everybody can vote as easily and fairly and seamlessly as possible. And then we want to be here. We are here because not only of the complete capitulation of the Republican party to an authoritarian cult of personality, we're here because of a series of failures by Democrats when they had power to secure the guardrails, if you will, to secure the fences. And now as I keep writing, now we're in a time of consequences. Now we have to pay for the failures of the past, and it's a question of how big that bill is going to be and how long before the authoritarians run out of steam. Historically speaking, it could be a very long time.
Andrea Chalupa (09:37):
Very long time.
Ari Berman (09:41):
There's just been this incredible attempt by the Republican party to weaponize Trump's big lie that voter suppression obviously did not begin in 2021. It's been going on for a long time in American history and it's been going on for a long time in the Republican party. But this is such an intensification and an acceleration of the existing effort, and I would say it's happening on two related tracks. One is all of the laws that have been passed to make it harder to vote. So in Georgia and in Florida and all of those things, whether it's making it more difficult to vote by mail or cutting back on the amount of time that people have to vote, making it harder in lots of different ways for people to cast ballots. Then there's the related effort, which is just to try to overturn the election results altogether in routine matters of election administration.
(10:29):
And those two things are related but also kind of different. And the fact that they're happening at the same time to me is what's most chilling here because we're basically setting up a situation where the Republican party is doing everything they can to make it harder to vote. And if somehow that doesn't succeed, then they have this fallback option, which is they can just try to nullify the will of the voters. And I'm not sure that that will succeed. I mean obviously Trump wanted them to do that in 2020 and it didn't happen, but I'm just basically very concerned that everything the Republican party is doing right now is to try to succeed where they failed in 2020.
Andrea Chalupa (11:06):
Yeah, without question. And I read somewhere that if all of these laws had been in place for 2020, Trump would still be president.
Ari Berman (11:15):
Yeah, I mean it's hard to know in terms of how would people have adopted to the laws, but it's certainly true that a lot of people used voting methods that have been cut back on. A lot of people were sent mail ballots or sent mail ballot request forms that they're not going to get anymore. A lot of people use drop boxes that won't be available anymore. Lot of people voted through methods that are going to be more difficult. There's less time to vote by mail, there's more rules to vote by mail, there's less time to vote early in some states there's new ID requirements. There's things like that that people won't be able to comply with. And then there's of course the fact that they're also intensifying control over how elections are run and managed. And so in certain states, like in Georgia, they have given the gerrymandered legislature a lot more control over the state election board and the power to potentially take over local election boards.
(12:08):
And they're also some of the Republicans that they weren't great, but they actually did do their jobs and stand up to Donald Trump and now they're being primaried or they've quit out of frustration. So there's this really toxic ingredient right now where the Republican party at every level is marching in lockstep to try to get an advantage in future elections. And of course, you guys have studied authoritarianism around the world. That's exactly what happens in authoritarian countries. You try to rig the results so that you'll never lose power in the first place, or if you are potentially voted out of power, the election results just won't be recognized. And I fear that's the situation we're heading in America right now.
Stephen Ujlaki (12:48):
Colin Weyrich was a Republican operative who initially worked for Goldwater and was devastated that Goldwater's loss, I mean, he was crushed in 64 and he said about trying to figure out how to get the Republicans to make the Republicans more competitive. He was also constantly creating these institutions. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation, which is alive and doing extremely well today. That was in 73, so 50 plus years later. But he was the one who decided that the way to get more power for the Republican party was to cultivate the evangelicals. The evangelicals had stayed away from politics ever since the Scopes trial and humiliated them. They repeated as country bumpkins and ignoramus because they believed in creationism and they believed that a bunch of things that the mainstream didn't believe in.
Andrea Chalupa (13:47):
Well, what's the Scopes trial?
Stephen Ujlaki (13:49):
The Scopes trial was a trial in which in the late twenties in which a school teacher I believe in Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. And this outraged those people who believed whose faith told them that the world was actually created in 6,000 years and that this was because what he was teaching was against what the Bible said. So they were outraged. There was a trial Clarence on one side and William Jen's Brian on the other two giants, and they were shown up to be again, the fact that they were so much against the modern spirit of science, that they were stuck in these beliefs that had, they believed were hundreds of years. They felt that what they said was the public square was the playground of the devil, and the only place they were safe was in their churches and amongst themselves.
(14:51):
They were really a subculture. And Wyrick was able to pry them loose by promising their leaders all sorts of wealth and advantages and political influence if they could convince their followers to vote Republican. And the way they decided to do that was to say to their followers, and of course these people believed blindly, I would say in evangelicals, and that their leader spoke the word from God. They said, you've got to vote Republican because it's the party of God. The Democratic Party is a party of the devil. So they came up with this as a way to get their followers to vote Republican. The incredible irony is that this is repeated verbatim to this day, and it's considered an article of faith among tens of millions of Americans, and it was only a device that was used in order to get the followers who were apolitical to actually vote and to vote Republican.
(15:53):
The other crazy thing that happened was that the real reason the evangelical leaders wanted to get involved was because they wanted to defend their segregated academies, Christian academies, and with the Brown versus Board of Education, they were no longer going to claim tax exempt status. And that enraged them and made them feel that they had to turn that around. Now, that was the real reason, but Wyrick very cleverly came up with a better rallying cry, and that was defending the rights of the unborn, something he made up. He was a Catholic, and so he knew the Catholics, conservative Catholics were against abortion. The Evangelicals had never had any problems with it. The Southern Baptist Convention in 73 after Rove vs Wade that decision. They applauded that decision. Falwell didn't talk against abortion for five years. It was only after there was a deal to be made that they changed their tune and abortion became the so-called reason why they had to go to the polls and what they had to defend. It's a scam on a massive level that was incredibly successful, both the rallying cry and the divisiveness in the country that it caused.
Nancy Maclean (17:15):
But another element, I think to the dumbing down of the American public and to the number of people who believe in things that are outright false, that can be easily disproved with facts, A key element of that, again, I think has the fingerprints of the folks I wrote about on it because the Koch network and a number of these allied organizations, including Grover, Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform and so forth, they all pushed for ending what was called the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting. And that happened in 1986. And when the Fairness doctrine and did that required accuracy for use of the public airwaves and balance and so forth, that's when you really saw Rush Limbaugh and right-Wing Talk radio take off that opened the way to Fox News and all of these other outlets that are worse than Fox News that actually people have shown studies have shown that people who watch these networks regularly have wrong ideas, right? Some of the documentation started with the Gulf War, but it's continued since, and certainly we see it with COVID, the COVID misinformation and the anti-vaccine efforts ideology that spread. A lot of that is kind of the combined fruit, I think, of the weakening of our schooling and also the growth of a very, very profitable industry of disinformation. So the incentives are kind of all wrong for enabling the people to have the information they need to make informed decisions in a reasonable way.
Jesse Eisinger (18:59):
What the right realizes in the early seventies is that the left has institutions, they control the commanding heights of the economy, of the government and of the culture, and they have a concerted effort to build institutions that can counteract that power. There's this famous memo from Louis Powell is the head of the Chamber of Commerce and becomes a Supreme Court justice, and he lays out, he says, there's this kind of naite anti-corporate revolution they're going to regulate and tax us to death, and we need to respond to that. And they start building these institutions and all these wealthy funders start to build a American Enterprise Institute and fund the Chamber of Commerce and the Cato Institute and Olin Foundation and Bradley Foundation, the Coors family, later the Kochs building this extraordinary network. So now what's interesting is that the right says that the left continues to control the commanding heights of the culture, but they kind of discount that the left doesn't remotely control the commanding heights of either the government or the economy or corporations.
(20:12):
Those are really people who are the running the society now. And so what the left needs to probably do is try to understand government power and regulating the wealthy in corporations to try to get there. You see this with the realization that we have to bring back antitrust, which is an interesting thing because it doesn't just fall on a progressive. It's not just progressive. There are these conservative traditions of being anti-big business. If there could be a political coalition there, then that could really be somewhat helpful. But what they're running into when they bring these cases to try to reverse mergers or challenge anti-competitive behavior is they're running into judges who are of the Reaganite-Bork revolution that overturned the New Deal antitrust movement that started in the seventies and eighties. And the Jonathan Cantor at the DOJ and Lena Khan at the FTC are bringing cases and getting rejected by judges, not just conservative judges, but judges that are appointed by Obama and even Biden, who rejecting their efforts to block mergers and reign in corporate monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.
(21:30):
You need basically a decades long movement to have legal thinking and appointees that put into place people who have a kind of more populist, economically egalitarian legal view. And I'll just point you to today or yesterday in the Atlantic, Caroline Frederickson who headed up the American Constitution Society, which is the analog to Leonard Leo's Federalist society. That's the liberal aversion of the Federalist Society. She says, I realize just now that we made a catastrophic mistake because we were focused on social issues, not economic issues. We never thought about looking at judges' attitudes stored antitrust. It didn't occur to us. She ran the a CS for 10 years. It's an extraordinary piece. It's such a damning admission. It should be a major scandal in progressive circles that she just was like, I thought Dobbs is the most important thing. And of course, abortion is extraordinarily important, but you cannot forget pocketbook issues. You can't just let corporations roll back decades of hard won labor reforms and regulation. And that's what the left did.
Nancy Maclean (22:46):
In the 1930s. The first kind of modern version of this kind of corporate led reaction was the American Liberty League that opposed the New Deal and the labor movement of that period, particularly the unions of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But they were actually quite ineffective, partly because they were so visibly self-interested and corporate, and I may not get the exact quote, but there was one person in Texas said that it would be, no, I'm not going to get it, but better to have a hundred reds from Moscow defend American industry than let American capitalists do it because they were so bad at it. So they really alienated people. They tried very hard to defeat the president in 1936 and in the midterm elections of 1934, and his margins just kept getting bigger and bigger. So they were really discredited at that point, the American Liberty League, but some of the same kinds of people and ideas then became part of the John Birch Society after World War II developing in the late 1950s.
(24:00):
And that body of course had Frank Koch, Charles Koch's father, as one of its key inner circle of directors. And Charles Koch himself joined and ironically left over the war in Vietnam later, but continued to have the economic ideas of the John Birch Society and some of the measures. But in any event, so co kept going, looking for a way to break through in the 1970s, he started funding think tanks like what became the Cato Institute started with another name. He thought that the Powell memorandum that you mentioned that basically advocated this corporate mobilization to transform American politics. It was done as a memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce. Koch thought that the Powell memorandum didn't go far enough. It was essentially kind of too reformist. So he continued investing in 1980, his brother David, ran as a candidate for the Libertarian party. And if you look up the platform of the Libertarian Party of 1980, basically you get the kind of Koch vision of what a good country would be, and it's really terrifying.
(25:13):
I mean, it's no public schools, no national parks, no postal service, nothing that we would recognize. It's just government stripped to what Libertarians see as its legitimate functions, which are only three. And they basically amount to army's courts and police. So providing for the national defense, ensuring the rule of law and guaranteeing social order. So that's the radical vision. But what Koch struggled with for decades was how to make that vision a reality when the overwhelming majority of people in this country and around the world would oppose it if they understood what it was. And what really began to change things in the new century was that he took the ideas of a figure that I wrote about in democracy and chains, a man named James McGill Buchanan, and turned those into a strategy for affecting this change, again, through rewriting the rules at every level through disinformation, et cetera. So that kind of brings us to where we are.
(26:24):
Charles Koch has been funding the Federalist Society since its creation in the 1980s. He boasts that he provided seed money to it, and the Koch network of donors who often now work through dark money operations such as donors, trust and freedom partners, chamber of Commerce is what they used to call Stand Together. They now do, but they've provided a great deal of money to the Federalist Society, which as our wonderful sitting senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse says, has captured our courts. And he points in particular to the Supreme Court conservative majority now of six to three, all of those six having deep ties to the Federalist Society and some of them being there illegitimately, if we go back and remember how they came to be seated. So this is really a tremendously powerful operation. And members of this Koch network, kind of Koch insiders were part of Donald Trump's administration from the very beginning.
(27:24):
We could get into detail on that. But bringing the story back to January 6th, seven of the eight senators who voted against certifying President Biden as the Victor of the 2020 election had been generously funded by the Koch donor network. And nearly all of the 147 members of the house who refused to certify the election were also products of that spending, political spending and of the think tanks and messaging operations and membership organizations funded by this donor network. So really what we're seeing in the January 6th events, and in all that's followed since the voter suppression and more gerrymandering attempts to pass laws to change the way that elections results will be counted and recognized, all of that is the product of literally decades of investment by Charles Koch in particular. And in more recent years, the hundreds of donors that he has convened behind this arch right strategy to basically undermine government as we've known it.
(28:35):
And here I'm not exaggerating, I'm a historian undermine government as we've known it over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. So they basically aim to use a kind of stealth strategy, and we can get into what I mean by that, but a stealth strategy to rewrite the rules of governance in America up to and including the Constitution in order to enable the kind of government that prevailed in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, a situation which workers had no rights to collective voice. There was no social provision like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, disenfranchisement was perfectly fine with the Supreme Court and so forth. It's division so radical that no one could imagine that it could be brought into being because it's such a minority vision. But that is why disinformation is central to this enterprise and also this very, very systematic rewriting of the rules of governance and law at the most detailed levels that would make most people's eyes glaze over, but enable these billionaires to advance their project.
(29:47):
It seemed that that stealth strategy from my findings really began to take off for the Koch network in the 1980s, and that was after the Pinoche dictatorship in Chile had come to power and had managed to privatize social security education and healthcare by and large with the people not having any power or freedom. Charles Koch made social security privatization the top priority of the Cato Institute, which just moved to Washington at the outset of the Reagan administration. And this was something that they knew they would never pass. And one of the people I wrote about advised them on this, and we can come back to the details, but basically understood that social security was so popular across so many different demographic groups in America, north, south, black, white, Latino, men, women, young, old, et cetera. Everybody loves social security. So there was no way they could attack it frontally.
(30:51):
So what they came up with in those years was what I called a crab walking strategy to kind of get there sideways. And that involved misinforming people putting out disinformation about the stability of social security, also trying to break up the coalition behind Social Security by dividing young people from seniors by dividing current recipients from others, et cetera. So lots of shenanigans basically to break up this solid pro social security failings. And that was really an illustration of something that then seemed to have become second nature to this network as they move forward with other projects and began to develop their apparatus. So one key element of this stealth strategy is disinformation, and as I mentioned about social security, they use disinformation about the stability of social security and whether it would be there for future generations to try to undermine popular support for it.
(31:55):
Well, they also began to develop what is now Americans for Prosperity in the 1990s with a group called Citizens United. And that group too relied heavily on disinformation to protect corporate power. So they worked closely with the tobacco industry to spread disinformation about the harms of tobacco when they were facing pressure for regulation and various kinds of anti-smoking measures, although we didn't know the Kochs at the time, so nobody really commented on them per se. The Citizens United, this group that they had created, led the fight against the Clinton Healthcare plan, and they did that of course by disinformation and other such measures. So then kind of moving into the more recent period where they really surged forward after President Obama was elected and really rode the wave of racist reaction to that that we can see now in hindsight, the whole birther phenomenon that wouldn't accept that this was a legitimate president.
(33:03):
And a lot of that congealed in the Tea Party that came into being in 2009. And so using the strength of that tea party movement, this Koch network worked very hard to get control of state legislatures in the 2010 midterms as a lot of people who had voted for President Obama sat out the elections. People talked about the enthusiasm gap. Well, through that, they managed to get control of, I think at the time it was 28 state legislatures, and in those state legislatures, every single one that they got control of, they engaged in radical rules change again with a kind of stealth framing of what they were doing, not really saying what they were doing and why. So classic example was Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin who suddenly took away collective bargaining rights from public sector workers. This was something he hadn't campaigned on, and he put it into a budget bill claiming that it was about the budget.
(34:08):
So again, that kind of stealth misrepresentation. And then Walker in Wisconsin, the state legislature in my state of North Carolina, all of these tea party oriented legislatures put in power by huge infusions of donor money from the Cokes and like donors engaged, first of all in the most radical gerrymander we've ever seen in political history in the US, radical and sophisticated, using all kinds of new social media data, et cetera, to misrepresent the voters. So that's again, another aspect of stealth to make it so that our votes don't really count because the way they've cracked and packed districts. Another element of the stealth strategy was pushing voter suppression measures under this covering rubric of voter combating voter fraud. But of course there was no such thing. But this helped to steer into passage, a number of voter suppression measures, also undermining the power of public sector labor unions and teachers unions in particular using all kinds of fraudulent claims about them. So that's what I mean by stealth in terms of when it started. You're absolutely right that well reaction has been part of this country going back to the founding and the deep south slaveholders and their impact on the constitution later, the crushing of reconstruction, et cetera. So there's a lineage here.
Jesse Eisinger (35:43):
Reagan was a extraordinary politician who came out of nowhere and was very radical and wins in 1980 after the Democrats have extraordinarily dispiriting presidency in Carter. Carter, I think actually had some very interesting things. So Nixon wins in 68. Nixon crushes McGovern in 72, and the Democratic party is just reeling, and they begin to think that they need to embrace the free market, that they've gone too far with social liberalism. And so you get Gary Hart, who really is a kind of neoliberal figure, embracing markets and deregulation, things like that. He doesn't win, but he's a young, energetic, charismatic, good looking politician who blows himself up, but he's very sort of successful. Then the Democratic party runs a bunch of older liberal lions and like Mondale, and they lose, they get crushed. So by getting crushed, they sort of really get afraid of reform, of economic reform. They start to no longer be the party of the working class.
Nancy Maclean (37:03):
Reagan, when he was elected in 1980, he really talked the talk of this cause in saying things like, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem. So he was very effective in framing this cause. But ironically, he did not walk the walk. I mean, he did a lot of radical changes, but nothing near what the Koch network types wanted. And so again, going back to social security reform, I have some stuff in the book from his budget director, David Stockman. And the language is just, I just had to quote him at length because he says basically Reagan didn't understand the kinds of cuts that would be needed to push through the kind of budget that they were talking about for his first budget. He wanted to cut government, but I think he had in mind he'd always had this antipathy to, he's the one who brought us the language of welfare queens and so forth.
(38:03):
And he seemed not to understand that the kinds of budget cuts that he had asked for would require attacking veterans benefits, farmers benefits, social security benefits, all these benefits of people who voted for the Republican party. And when he saw that, he's like, oh my God, I don't want to do that. I'll be unpopular. And so essentially what he did is just let the deficit surge. So he continued spending but not taking in adequate tax to cover that spending. So that was one of the many experiences that led this Koch network to think we cannot rely on these elected officials working within the system to do what they say they will. Because if they want to be popular as they saw with Reagan, they will back up from this extreme agenda because the people won't want it and the people will vote them out of office.
(39:01):
So that Reagan presidency was actually quite important as a pivot in this radicalization of some of these arch right corporate figures like Charles Koch. And then the administration of George W. Bush really confirmed that in the new century because he too, even though he was the most conservative president to date at that time, he also wanted to be popular. So he enacted a prescription drug benefit for seniors, and that made these guys crazy. And he also failed at Social security reform. Even I'm using their language, they'd call it Social Security reform. It's actually social security privatization. But in any event, a series of experiences made them realize that whenever elected officials were accountable to majorities, were accountable to a fully enfranchised, accurately represented public, they would pull back from the brink and they wouldn't do what the donors wanted them to do. So that is why they turned to stealth and to this radical rewriting of the rules of governance, including things like again, gerrymandering, voter suppression, trying to destroy the power of labor unions and so forth, because they wanted to insulate elected officials that they were pushing out to do these things from the reaction of the public.
(40:35):
And of course, their ultimate way of insulating elected officials from public pressure is a push to rewrite the Constitution.
Anne Nelson (40:46):
Institution Project 2025 is a document that was released under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation a few months ago in late 2023. And it is a blueprint for the way that the radical right wing of the Republican Party plans to transform American flawed but functional democracy into a complete dictatorship. That's the short answer, but it goes into 900 pages of detailed information about exactly how they're going to do that throughout virtually every possible branch of the government.
Andrea Chalupa (41:27):
And what are some ways they plan to do this?
Anne Nelson (41:30):
Well, some of them are old favorite of the Heritage Foundation and the extreme right wing. The climate policy elimination is disastrous. Withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and every other environmental international agreement eliminate emissions controls because we need to burn as many fossil fuels as quickly as possible because the priority is the profit for the profit stream for the fossil fuels industry. Remove even energy ratings on your air conditioner and your refrigerator so you can just keep burning that fuel so the environmental areas are egregious. And also remove things like the Migratory Bird Act to protect in disparate species and so on. Then you will have the taxation end where they still think that the wealthy pay too many taxes, although they pay very few. So they want to continue to lower every possible tax for the ultra wealthy in corporation. Then you've got the social elements, which are what they use to engage fundamentalists and people who want the United States to be a theocracy.
(42:52):
So they have this wording that says every child has a right to be raised by the biological male and female who conceive them, which is pretty extreme. And obviously this is trying to reverse marriage equality, but along the way, I guess they want to reverse adoption and foster care and everything else because it's this blind family policy. Draconian measures against trans people, but also measures against the entire LGBT population. They want to remove all of their civil and political rights so that a person can be fired from a job simply for being gay. Right. Talk about throwing it back into like a hundred years or so, reverse not just abortion, but they're starting to challenge various forms of birth control so that we can keep women in the kitchen.
(43:47):
Well, as I said, there are 900 pages, and I guess the final area that I should stress is that it is saying that regardless of whether Trump wins the election in the fall or it's any Republican candidate, they want a concentration of government powers in the White House. So the President has personal control over things like the FBI. So we can have a secret police state that the president has control over the State Department and new...
Andrea Chalupa (44:19):
The DOJ. The DOJ.
Anne Nelson (44:21):
Both.
Andrea Chalupa (44:22):
Oh, both. Okay.
Anne Nelson (44:24):
No, yeah. FBI and DOJ are one silo, but also the State Department so that you forget about career diplomat and you install crony in significant positions, including the ambassadorship so that you can just cut deals with foreign countries at will. A generalized purge of something like 40,000 federal employees to be replaced by people that they aren't recruiting and training now on an ideological basis. So they're recruiting their own right wing ideologue and training them to take the place in government of our professional civil service.
Andrea Chalupa (45:06):
Can they find 40,000 people to do this.
Anne Nelson (45:11):
Well, given that they have no educational other requirements, they probably can. I mean, competance and preparation and qualifications have nothing to do with it. It's just whether you'll follow the leader or not.
Andrea Chalupa (45:24):
That's what it comes down to.
Anne Nelson (45:26):
Yeah, they have online training underway for these people and they're already organizing the staffing. And it's important to remember that a lot of this movement, which has been coordinated through organizations with the Council for National Policy in the past, so they have worked through the Leadership Institute, which is a core organization and is involved in this recruitment and training. And they claim that they've already trained over 270,000 people to be candidates, campaign workers, and other related functions. So they've already got a core there.
Andrea Chalupa (46:05):
So basically the Trump campaign, which Gabe Sherman and Vanity Fair recently wrote is extremely well organized this time around, would roll into Project 2025 presumably, and be part of carrying all this out.
Anne Nelson (46:23):
Well, I don't think that Trump can win without the support of a hundred plus organizations who signed on to Project 2025
Andrea Chalupa (46:32):
Over a hundred.
Anne Nelson (46:33):
And you have to remember that these are a lot of the same organizations that got behind Trump and pushed in 2016. These organizations, again, many of 'em are affiliated with the Council for National Policy like the Anti-Abortion, Susan B. Anthony Co Life, America Life Heritage Foundation, and so on. And these are the groups, as I described in my book, that met with Trump in June, 2016 and made this deal with him where they would give him money and personnel and strategists in return for him, giving them the court that they wanted, which he indeed had, not just at the Supreme Court level, but all the way down through the federal judiciary. Now, of these hundred organizations, roughly half have received funding from the Koch network, representing the fossil fuel of interest and the anti-environmental interest. And roughly half have received funding from the Leonard Leo funding operation, which is connected with Extreme right Catholic. And there's some overlap. So you're talking about an operation that has literally billions of dollars behind it.
Andrea Chalupa (47:53):
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(49:01):
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