Expert Details The Secretive Shadow Network' Behind America's Radical Right For The Past 40 Years - Raw Story

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Expert details the secretive

network’ behind America’s
right for the past 40 years
Published 9 hours ago on October 22, 2020
By Bill Moyers

 ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy.


What is the shadow network behind the nomination of 
Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? Who

selected and groomed her for this moment? Who’s
 nancing the campaign to get her con rmed? Who’s
counting on her to side with President Trump if he’s
losing the election and wants the Supreme Court to
declare him the winner? For the answers, Bill Moyers
talks to journalist and investigator Anne Nelson about
her book: SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND
THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. In it, she
exposes the powerful and little-known Council for
National Policy, the organization behind the
conservative movement of the past 40 years – from
Ronald Reagan’s secret war in Central America to their
success in turning the Supreme Court into the Trump
Court. Ms. Nelson has received the Livingston Award
for her journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for
historical research. Here to talk with her is Bill Moyers.
Moyers on Democracy
Bill Moyers talks with Anne Nelson about … Share
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Moyers on Democracy · Bill Moyers talks with Anne Nelson about “The Shadow Network”
BILL MOYERS: Welcome. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
ANNE NELSON: My pleasure.
BILL MOYERS: Let me begin with the most current

part of the story, which comes just a little bit after your
book is published when the conservative movement is
facing a very decisive encounter with the very forces it’s
been trying to defeat now for 40 years. How do you
think the shadow network reads the con rmation of
Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? What are
they making of it?
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST Well,
US NEWS I think
2020 that
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great triumph and a kind of culmination of 40 years of

effort. And I demure a bit at the term conservative
because this is, for me, the radical right. It is so far to
the right of mainstream American public opinion that I
feel that it’s in a different category both in terms of its
ideology and its tactics. But they decided way back in
the day of Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the
movement that they–
BILL MOYERS: In the early 1970s, right?
Read an excerpt
ANNE NELSON: We’re going back to the ’70s and even
earlier, because he was active on the Barry Goldwater
campaign. And he was frustrated time and again by
moderates in the Republican Party and people who
were willing to work with Democrats to advance policy
and solutions to public problems. And he created
organizations and tactics that he openly declared
should destroy the regime, as he called it, which would
be the U.S. government as we’ve known it for the last
century.
BILL MOYERS: Paul Weyrich is the man I remember

saying–
PAUL WEYRICH: I don’t want 

everybody to vote. Elections are not
won by a majority of people. They
never have been from the beginning
of our country and they are not now.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in
the elections quite candidly goes up
as the voting populous goes down.
BILL MOYERS: He was essentially saying, as a newly

anointed leader of the religious right, what their
philosophy was. The fewer people vote, the better their
chance.
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST That’s
US NEWS right.
2020 And
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in terms of their electoral tactics, it has been a matter

of weaponizing certain churches and pastors and really
exerting tremendous pressure on them to use churches
as instruments of a radical right ideology. And then
using similar tactics to suppress votes for Democrats,
especially in key battleground states.
BILL MOYERS: So that’s why you conclude in your

book they were to the right of the Republican Party.
They were not just an offshoot of the Republican Party.
They were not just fundraisers for the Republican Party,

but they were ideologically and organizationally taking
the Republican Party far to the right.
ANNE NELSON: Absolutely, and somewhat to my

surprise, I found that their prototype was the Southern
Baptist Convention, where they decided that in order to
move it to the right, they had to use questionable
tactics to elevate their supporters to key positions of
in uence and purge the Southern Baptist Convention
of moderates in the seminaries and in the colleges and
among the pastors. And it was a fairly ruthless process,
and once these tactics were developed, they applied it
to the Republican Party. And you had the same kind of
tactics going on of purging moderates, some of whom
had been in of ce for years.
BILL MOYERS: I should point out to some of our

younger listeners and readers that the Southern Baptist
Convention at the time and still today was the largest
Protestant denomination in America. You know,
something like it eventually reached 16 and a half
million members scattered throughout the South and
the West. We’ll come back to them in a moment. What
do you think about the NEW YORK TIMES’ assessment
that Amy Coney Barrett represents a new
conservativism rooted in faith. That’s how their
headline described a three-page portrait of her life and 
career. Does that make sense to you?
ANNE NELSON: Not entirely, because as a

conservative Catholic, she follows in the footsteps of
others such as Brett Kavanaugh and Antonin Scalia. So
that’s not very new. And what I look at in my book
SHADOW NETWORK is how these interlocking
organizations support each other. The book is about
the Council for National Policy– a radical right-wing
organization that is very secretive, and it brings
together big donors like the DeVos family and oil
interests from Texas and Oklahoma and political
operatives. And, for example, members include the
leadership of the Federalist Society. Well, Amy Coney
Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society for a
number of years and is still a speaker at their events. It
includes the head of Hillsdale College, which is one of
their campus partners. Amy Coney Barrett was
commencement speaker for Hillsdale College this year.
So, there are all of these organizations that have been
turning their wheels to promote her really for several
years going back. She appeared on previous lists of
potential nominees for the Supreme Court, and I don’t
believe she would have been included in those lists had
she not con rmed to their traditional idea of an activist
judge.

BILL MOYERS: They knew what they were looking for.
ANNE NELSON: And I should add that one of the most

powerful components in the Council for National Policy
is the anti-abortion movement. Organizations such as
the Susan B. Anthony List and Concerned Women for
America and other interests, which are anti-
environmentalist interests from the fossil fuels
industry. So, I think that we’ve seen a roadmap of what
to expect moving forward.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me, who does make up the Council
for National Policy?
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST So, the Council
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traditionally been around 400 members. From the

beginning, it’s included people with big money, a lot of
them from the Texas and Oklahoma oil industries, but
also the DeVos family of Michigan from the Amway
fortune, and Betsy DeVos, of course. So, it has the big
money to pay for things. It’s got the leaders of so-called
grassroots organizations. Now, I say so-called, because
they do not spring from the grassroots the way that you
would expect from the name. They are organized with a
great deal of money from the top down. So, for
example, the National Ri e Association– their 
leadership is part of the CNP. They get money from the
donors, they organize their millions of members, and
you combine these with the strategists and the media
owners. And I spend a lot of time in my book talking
about the power of fundamentalist and conservative
radio in swing states. Things that people on the East
Coast overlook to a terrible degree. And the same thing
with fundamentalist broadcasting, which has really
several of these broadcasters — the Christian
Broadcasting Network, the Trinity Broadcasting
Network have really turned into outlets replicating the
messaging from this organization. So, you have them
interlocking and interacting and each supporting each
other’s function. And I should explain something here,
which is that they represent historically a white,
Protestant, I’m sorry, but male-dominated patriarchy–
BILL MOYERS: No, that’s okay.
ANNE NELSON: And I have to say that

demographically its time has passed. The United States
has become more diverse religiously, ethnically, and
racially. And they recognize that their core positions
are not supported by the majority of Americans. So,
they went to the limit, pulled out all the stops to get
Trump elected by a tiny margin, but they doubt that

they can do that again. The signs are not good. What
they can do is make their hold on the federal courts
concrete through the Supreme Court, and therefore, get
majorities in cases like gerrymandering, voter
suppression, and their political activation of the
churches with tax-exempt status. And further their
hold on power through the courts.
BILL MOYERS: So which part of the shadow network

do you think chose, mentored, and groomed Amy
Coney Barrett for this moment?
ANNE NELSON: Well, I have to speculate here. But I
would see a fairly straight line from her position to
Leonard Leo’s. Now, Leonard Leo is a very conservative
Catholic. He was the operational gure of the
Federalist Society for a number of years, and recently
he shifted from that position to an even more activist
position. Amy Coney Barrett was already a member of
the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society has a
pipeline through the lower federal courts, which she
bene ted from. So, in terms of this Catholic interaction
they would be quite close to each other. Another key
gure is Carrie Severino, who is from the Judicial Crisis
Network, which was co-founded by Leonard Leo. And
again, very right-wing Catholics who have tended to be
overlooked while people focus on the fundamentalist

Protestants. But Ralph Reed, who has been somebody
who’s been active with the fundamentalist
politicization for decades declared openly years ago
that the next step to their campaign was to enlist the
Catholic vote. And they’ve been aggressively doing that
in recent years.
BILL MOYERS: And then there’s Don McGahn who was

for three years Donald Trump’s chief White House
counsel, graduate of Notre Dame, admirer of Amy
Coney Barrett, who was scouting himself for recruits to
bring up, train, groom, and put into the mix for
potential Supreme Court justices. And I read that he
was highly enthusiastic about her, had talked to Leo
and that they had you had both these White House and
legal forces behind her, knowing that she was one of
them.
ANNE NELSON: Yes. And I would guess that they

suffered enough embarrassment over the Brett
Kavanaugh hearings and the discussion of possible
sexual harassment that was involved, that it was a
convenient moment to bring a female to the top of the
list to avoid that. So, there were a number of elements
in her favor. I should add that in the process of these
nominations Trump cut a deal in 2016 with this 
movement, and it was publicly reported that he was
going to accept lists of nominees from three
organizations run by Council for National Policy
members: the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist
Society, and the National Ri e Association, believe it or
not. And he has actually followed suit with that. The
Federalist Society has taken the lead on this, but you
will nd the Heritage Foundation in the background of
all of these proceedings, as well as the NRA.
BILL MOYERS: Did you see anybody from the shadow

network at the White House when President Trump
announced her nomination? Could you identify any
there as members of the Council for National Policy?
ANNE NELSON:
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fact, IGETcould. I’ve
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got the September 2020 membership list. So, I went

through U.S.A. Today’s publication of who was present
at that event, which has been called the COVID
superspreader event on September 29th. And what I
found was that they had six members of the White
House staff, nine members of congress, and 14 current
members of the Council for National Policy.
BILL MOYERS: Fourteen?
The moment of truth in those hearings came when she

[Amy Coney Barrett] was asked if it was against the law 
to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she
couldn’t answer that. Which to me demonstrated either
an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is
truly alarming on the eve of an election.
ANNE NELSON: Fourteen, and 12 of them were from

the leadership bodies, the board of governors, and the
gold circle elite members. So, they were there in force.
They were having a victory dance this was a
culmination of plans that had been in the works for
decades.
BILL MOYERS: But if she is willing to put people at
risk that way, to go along with the president in ignoring
guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, are we
okay in asking questions about her judgment? I mean,
could she not have said, “Mr. President, I’m honored by
this nomination, but can you wait until there’s better
days for us to do this?”
ANNE NELSON: I think that statement would have

required someone who could restrain their ambition.
And for me, the moment of truth in those hearings
came when she was asked if it was against the law to
interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she
couldn’t answer that either. Which to me demonstrated
either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law 
that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.
BILL MOYERS: I was noticing in a story in THE

WASHINGTON POST that the Council for National
Policy had a three-day meeting in Southern California.
And one member — a woman named Rachel Bovard —
described Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas as
a crucial link to the White House. “She is one of the
most powerful and erce women in Washington. She is
really the tip of the spear in these efforts.” Did you
come across Ginni Thomas in your book?
ANNE NELSON: I came across her repeatedly, and she
has risen to the rank of the executive committee of CNP
Action, which is their lobbying arm. She also is very
active with another CNP member named Charlie Kirk
who runs something called Turning Point U.S.A. She’s
also a so-called correspondent for a right-wing media
platform called The Daily Caller, which is owned by
members of the Council for National Policy. So, Ginni
Thomas, who is from Omaha is married to a Supreme
Court justice and is both a public and behind-the-
scenes radical right-wing activist across the country. I
don’t know what the protocol is for spouses of Supreme
Court justices, but I nd it dif cult to believe that
people think this is appropriate.

BILL MOYERS: But what struck me about that is that
so many of the characters that are now on stage in the
third and fourth year of Trump’s administration are
clearly linked by the Council for National Policy,
something few Americans have heard of. How did you
come upon it?
ANNE NELSON: In my early 20s, I was a reporter in El

Salvador. And from there, I joined the staff of Human
Rights Watch. And so, I knew a lot about death squads
in El Salvador, and learned in writing this book that the
Council for National Policy and its partners had hosted
death squad leader, Roberto d’Aubuisson, in
Washington. An idea that was just shocking to me.
They were heavily involved in the Contras during the
Reagan administration. The support for the extreme
right wing in El Salvador. I didn’t know that at the time.
I circled back to them decades later. I was in my
hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, driving to Walmart
and had the radio on. And started hearing some radio
accusations against John Kerry who was running for
president at the time, that shocked me, because the
local preacher was claiming that John Kerry would
make heterosexual marriages unsancti ed by
promoting marriage equality. And it was a very strange
statement. So later I started tracking who owned that
radio station, and then I found out it belonged to a

group of radio stations owned by members of the
Council for National Policy. And then I said, “Well,
what’s that?” And, as you know, an investigative
reporter just keeps pulling at the thread until
something emerges. They were incredibly secretive,
and I think it’s only thanks to the internet and things
that they’ve inadvertently published online that’s made
this research even possible.
BILL MOYERS: Let me summarize what I take away

from your book the SHADOW NETWORK. You say that,
for these past four decades, it’s been a strategic nerve
center for channeling money and mobilizing votes out
of sight, correct?
ANNE NELSON: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: How did they get away with that?
ANNE NELSON: Well, I say a few times in the book

that I think the Democrats have been asleep at the
wheel. But part of the problem is rooted in our crisis in
journalism. Because when I was growing up, you had
lots of vibrant local newspapers that published AP and
New York Times syndicate stories on international and
national news, as well as the local news and the
basketball scores. And you had a population across the 
country that was working from the same page, as it
were. These newspapers have been dying off. They have
lost their business model due to the digital revolution
and the economic crises. And nature abhors a vacuum.
In their place, these fundamentalist radio stations and
this engine for misinformation has taken their place.
And it makes me angry. When you lose the local
professional news organizations, the substitutes can
lead people down a terribly damaging path.
BILL MOYERS: How do you connect that to the growth

of the Council for National Policy.
ANNE NELSON: They use a lot of stalking horses in
terms of their organizations. So, I think most people
wouldn’t think of the National Ri e Association as
primarily a political organization. Certainly, they didn’t
in the 1970s. It was kind of a shooting club. It’s been
converted into a political organization. And that has
happened with tens of thousands of churches. And I
grew up in those communities. I don’t think my friends
and neighbors and family members went to church
thinking, “We’re going to go get told how to vote.”
That’s not what they went for. But now that’s what they
get. And they are given voting guides in the sanctuaries
inserted into the church bulletin, right? You turn the
page from the hymn, and there you get the voting guide
basically telling you to vote for a Republican. But it

doesn’t have the signature of the Council for National
Policy. It just says, iVoterGuide produced by the Family
Research Council, whose president has been the
president of the Council for National Policy. So, you’ve
got t0 connect the dots, but the dots are all there and
highly connectable. You have people who are
identifying with organizations, and they’re looking at
news media such as The Daily Caller, such as the
Christian Broadcasting Network, such as Salem Media,
which are tied into this system. And it’s not about
journalism. It’s about messaging: we’re going to tell
you what to think.
BILL
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handful of people. How did they multiply their effect so

thoroughly throughout our political system that they
now dominate. How did that happen?
ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that what you had is this

odd element of our electoral system where the electoral
college carries this weight. And a lot of candidates for
national of ce focus on the popular vote, but the
strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the
popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college
is what elects our president. So, what they gured out

how to do was identify critical bands of voters who
were corresponding to these mostly religious
organizations in critical states. If you could reach these
millions of voters, many of whom were not engaged,
and convince them that it was a sin to vote for a
Democrat, then you could win the state. And if you won
the right states, you’d win the electoral college. And
they worked on this approach over various decades.
And they kept going to various Republican candidates
and bringing their voters to them and trying to cut a
deal where they would deliver the response in terms of
power. And I have to say that, a number of presidents
including Reagan and the rst President Bush had
those conversations and reneged on the deal, right?
They did not deliver the cabinet appointments. They
did not deliver the reactionary social policies. And what
they found with Trump was a transactional president
who didn’t really care about abortion or gay marriage
or any of the rest of it. He just wanted the of ce. So, he
cut a deal and he honored it. And he gave the former
president of the Council for National Policy, Tony
Perkins, carte blanche to write elements of the
Republican Party platform in 2016, which have been
just renewed for 2020 without amendment. So, they
worked behind the scenes. It’s been in uence peddling,
and it’s been big, big money. The book traces hundreds

of millions of dollars that have sloshed around in this
circular way where the DeVoses fund the Koch brothers’
operations. And the Koch brothers fund the DeVoses
and Foster Friess funds The Daily Caller. And when you
have the Democrats not paying suf cient attention to
the swing states, when you have the local media in a
state of collapse, that is the window of opportunity.
Strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the

popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college
is what elects our president. So, what they gured out
how to do was identify critical bands of voters.
BILL MOYERS: So, we have the pastors on one side
and the plutocrats on the other side. You have this
alliance between very dogmatic, religious zealots and
men of huge wealth whose interest is not in piety. What
joins them?
ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that, in religious terms,

it’s all about mammon.
BILL MOYERS: Mammon being the biblical term for

money.
ANNE NELSON: That’s right.
BILL MOYERS: The biblical metaphor for money.
ANNE NELSON: Yes. I keep looking at their so-called 

positions of principle. And, you know, you scratch at
them and they don’t go very deep. But what you do
have with the Kochs’ and the DeVoses and the various
fossil fuel interests are people who’ve made immense
fortunes and are terri ed of losing their economic
power. But also, these people don’t want to pay taxes,
and so pushing through a tax bill that favored the
fraction of a 1% was a priority. And Donald Trump and
the Republican Senate delivered it.
BILL MOYERS: The Washington Post last week

released some video of the August meeting of the
Council for National Policy. Let me just read a few
things that were said at that meeting. Videos provided
to the Post covering dozens of hours of CNP meetings
over three days in February and three in August offer
an inside view of participants’ obsessions. Here are
some of the things that were said:
BILL WALTON: This is a spiritual

battle we’re in. This is good versus
evil. We have to do everything we can
to win.
BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy’s

executive committee president, Bill Walton. Ralph

Reed, chairman of the nonpro t, Faith and Freedom
Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are
going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We’re
going to be speci cally going in, not only to white
evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian
churches and collecting those ballots.’” And then,
here’s the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J.
Christian Adams, a former Justice Department of cial
and the president of the Public Interest Legal
Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the
number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists
not to worry about the criticism that might come their
way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that
you’re a voter suppressor.” Any of that surprise you?
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST Not
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you’ll nd the footprints of those statements in my

book. One of the techniques that this movement has
used is using data pro les and directing information to
voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to
suppress the vote if they’re not likely to. The Koch
brothers brought state-of-the-art political data
operations to the table with an organization called
i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that
were run by CNP members. So, for example, one of
them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-
abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also 
combined data from churches and from political data
and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for
these organizations to do their door-to-door
canvassing having a huge amount of information about
each individual voter, and a tailored individual script
for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in
Spring eld, Missouri, and you’re working for the Susan
B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an
address, there’s a Catholic housewife with six kids there
who watched an anti-abortion lm on Net ix and
ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have
all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script
that’s been prepared and tailored for that voter, right?
But you’re going to have a totally different script based
on the data for the next-door neighbor who’s a gun
owner who’s all about the second amendment. And the
Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data
they have, but the way they’ve networked data across
state lines and to organizations that are doing their
political groundwork. So that’s been a factor. The use of
data has been very important in the last few
campaigns, and not always well-understood. But
there’s also a really important matter of how data is
used to suppress votes. And that’s where I would direct
people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain.

The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch
brothers’ data platform i360 used data from Cambridge
Analytica with several hundred million voters, with
some 2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes
you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and
so what they did in this story documenting what
happened with African Americans in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, was nd that if voters were not likely to
vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they
would target them with misinformation that would
disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such
as what’s been documented in Michigan, some 90,000
African American voters were persuaded not to vote for
the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these
methods. So, in these states, they always go by very,
very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of
these data operations, some of them of questionable
legality, have actually changed the course of electoral
history.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think they’re doing for

this election in two weeks?
ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020

app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its
privacy and the way it accesses people’s cell phone
directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and

then sends messages out to them, often without the
user knowing that they’re doing it. They also combine
that with consumer data. So, for example, if you
downloaded their app on one phone that was a
different account, they could trace your credit card
records back to your own account. They also use
geolocation, so once you download the app, they gure
out where you are and what kind of messaging would
appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters.
And they use this through beacons that are placed
around areas like political rallies and churches, right,
to locate the people with the apps and then engage
them for political purpose. It has been recently
revealed that these beacons had even been implanted
in Trump yard signs. So, they’re really, I would say, on
the cutting edge of political technology. And it’s in this
very murky area of law where there are abusive
practices involving privacy, but there’s no clear legal
framework to govern it.
BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to

connect this very sophisticated information gained by
very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor
pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are
concerned about the state of the world. And here,
they’ve been led into, one of the most sophisticated
political campaigns that really has not their interest at 
heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–
ANNE NELSON: Absolutely. And again, these are the

people I grew up with, and I see a lot of cases where the
pastors have been bullied into it. And they say, “Wait a
minute, I want people to come to church and re ect on
spirituality. We’re not here to run a political campaign.”
BILL MOYERS: Yet the fact remains, as you make clear

in the book, that they have a very acute grasp of
electoral college politics. How do you win the 270 votes
of the electoral college, even if you lost the popular
vote? How did they get there?
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST Well,
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NEWSLETTER A
they worked harder at it than the Democrats have.

They’ve got a pollster named George Barna.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
ANNE NELSON: And he has paid a lot of attention to

these voters. He has identi ed characteristics to them,
and one of them is that older white evangelicals from
largely rural areas have a 91% turnout at the polling
places. That is powerful. And that’s something where
it’s not exactly fashionable in Democratic circles to talk
about that. And why we should have a dialogue with 
these voters. So, when you get that information, and
when you work over and over again to re ne messaging
that will touch a nerve with these groups, some of it’s
misinformation, and some of it’s just hard work and
smart strategy.
BILL MOYERS: And they have enlisted these

fundamentalist white churches to serve as their
political proxies by doing smart things, like inviting
them on junkets that the CNP pays for, writing sermons
for them to download, producing their church bulletins
for them, and delivering voter guides to them for
distribution to their congregations. That’s down at the
very grassroots. And they do it.
ANNE NELSON:
WE’VE GOT ISSUES PODCAST They’ve
US NEWS even TRUMP
2020 constructed
VIDEO a THE
GET multi-
NEWSLETTER A
million-dollar Museum of the Bible, steps from Capitol

Hill. And it’s really a kind of monument to conservative
fundamentalist political ideology.
BILL MOYERS: It’s really a remarkable turn of

American politics in the last 40 years, and you have
written a very smart, detailed, informative, and
narratively-driven book on it. You say, in your epilogue,
in the beginning, there were the Southern Baptists, and
there were two of them in particular, Pastor Paige
Patterson — who became president of the Baptist

seminary I had attended long before him — and a state
judge named Paul Pressler. In effect, you say, they
started it all. The Southern Baptists were the core.
ANNE NELSON: They were kind of the godfathers, I

would say, yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Southern Baptists had long believed in

the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible is literally
God’s word. But my generation of Baptists were
discovering historical criticism of the Bible and began
to change the denomination. And what Paige Patterson
and Paul Pressler did was to alarm the Baptists who
still believed in the literal meaning of the Bible and
said, “They’re going to take it away from you if you’re
not careful.” And so they were able to drive the
moderate leaders out of the Southern Baptist
Convention and replace them with literalist,
fundamentalist pastors from churches around the
country, including some very large churches. And
before we knew it, the Southern Baptist Convention
had become a radically conservative Republican
denomination.
ANNE NELSON: Yeah, and I see that as tragic, because

it divides families, it divides communities. It changes
the nature of spirituality in these communities. But
then you see those tactics, which are all about power, 
right? And they’re replicated in the Republican Party.
Same thing happens. You drive out the moderates, you
defeat the moderates, and you replace them with
ideologues or card-carrying members of the movement.
And I think we can look at Amy Coney Barrett as
another iteration of the same thing. What you’re doing
is weeding out the moderate and liberal judges and
replacing them with people who will march to this
beat. And traditionally, that’s not been the principle for
our court. People could say, “The courts need to have
some kind of standard that’s open to all Americans,”
not something that’s driving a particular minority
ideology. So, for me, that’s the glaring danger that’s
facing our democracy.
BILL MOYERS: And you sum up the Council for

National Policy as, “An elite club of high-powered
fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, deploying a
media empire to ood the country with propaganda,
bankrolling handpicked colleges to promote extremist
Libertarian ideas, and to groom up and coming
politicians,” and I would say judges, “to advance its
cause.” And you say this is all aimed at the very heart of
democracy.
ANNE NELSON: Well, democracy is the blind man and


the elephant, because my democracy is an America
where people from diverse religions and national
backgrounds came together and chose to live together
under the rule of law. It aspired to give everyone equal
opportunity and rights as citizens. And I don’t want
another religion imposing its practice on me, that’s not
my idea of being an American or respecting my fellow
Americans. If their idea of the American ideal is so
different, I would think they’d have to show some
evidence that the majority of Americans saw it their
way. And the evidence is all to the contrary and moving
in the opposite direction. So that’s why we’re seeing so
many manifestations of questionable maneuvers for
securing power, as opposed to winning it through the
ballot box. We’ve got two weeks before the elections.
Then we’ve got another period which is the
interregnum until the inauguration. But then we’re
going to have this entire cohort in the judiciary which
is going to be de ning our public life for years, perhaps
decades to come. So I’m afraid it’s going to be no rest
for the weary. The cliche is, “Eternal vigilance is the
price of freedom.” And I think that eternal vigilance is
going to be very important for everyone who wants to
defend other people’s rights.
BILL MOYERS: Anne Nelson, thank you so much for

SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE 
SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. And thank you
for your time today.
ANNE NELSON: Thank you so much, Bill.
ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to Moyers on

Democracy. On our website, you can read an excerpt
from Anne Nelson’s book. Until next time, you’ll nd
all this and more at Billmoyers.com.
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Republicans upset with Steve
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in stimulus negotiations with Nan

Pelosi: report
Published 25 mins ago on October 22, 2020
By Sky Palma 
According to the Washington Post, Treasury Secretary

Steven Mnuchin is garnering the frustration of
Republicans for making what they see as unacceptable
compromises with Democrats in his quest for a 
stimulus deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
“He negotiates harder with his own side than he does

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with her. Folks over here are sick of it,” one Senate GOP
Trumpworld ‘going all in on QAno
with the election less than 2 wee

away: report
By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
Whenever President Donald Trump is asked about

QAnon extremists, he will say a few nice things about
them while insisting that he knows very little about the
movement. But journalist Will Sommer, in an article 
published by the Daily Beast on October 22, reports
that Trump's allies are trying to use the QAnon
conspiracy theory to get him reelected.
CONTINUE READING
‘That family is basically a

racketeering enterprise’: Ex-Oba
adviser blasts scandals from
Trump’s adult children

By Sarah K. Burris
In an MSNBC discussion, the panel claimed that they

haven't heard enough from former Vice President Joe
Biden about his son Hunter and what he plans to do to
ensure there's no impropriety.

Biden has said that in his administration none of his
family members will be hired staffers, a signi cant
CONTINUE READING
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 ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy.

Bill Moyers talks with Anne Nelson about … Share

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

ANNE NELSON: My pleasure.

BILL MOYERS: Let me begin with the most current

great triumph and a kind of culmination of 40 years of

BILL MOYERS: In the early 1970s, right?

BILL MOYERS: Paul Weyrich is the man I remember

PAUL WEYRICH: I don’t want 

BILL MOYERS: He was essentially saying, as a newly

in terms of their electoral tactics, it has been a matter

BILL MOYERS: So that’s why you conclude in your

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely, and somewhat to my

BILL MOYERS: I should point out to some of our

ANNE NELSON: Not entirely, because as a

ANNE NELSON: And I should add that one of the most

traditionally been around 400 members. From the

BILL MOYERS: No, that’s okay.

ANNE NELSON: And I have to say that

BILL MOYERS: So which part of the shadow network

BILL MOYERS: And then there’s Don McGahn who was

ANNE NELSON: Yes. And I would guess that they

BILL MOYERS: Did you see anybody from the shadow

got the September 2020 membership list. So, I went

BILL MOYERS: Fourteen?

The moment of truth in those hearings came when she

ANNE NELSON: Fourteen, and 12 of them were from

ANNE NELSON: I think that statement would have

BILL MOYERS: I was noticing in a story in THE

ANNE NELSON: In my early 20s, I was a reporter in El

BILL MOYERS: Let me summarize what I take away

ANNE NELSON: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How did they get away with that?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I say a few times in the book

BILL MOYERS: How do you connect that to the growth

handful of people. How did they multiply their effect so

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that what you had is this

Strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that, in religious terms,

BILL MOYERS: Mammon being the biblical term for

ANNE NELSON: That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: The biblical metaphor for money.

ANNE NELSON: Yes. I keep looking at their so-called 

BILL MOYERS: The Washington Post last week

BILL WALTON: This is a spiritual

BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy’s

you’ll nd the footprints of those statements in my

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they’re doing for

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely. And again, these are the

BILL MOYERS: Yet the fact remains, as you make clear

they worked harder at it than the Democrats have.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

ANNE NELSON: And he has paid a lot of attention to

BILL MOYERS: And they have enlisted these

million-dollar Museum of the Bible, steps from Capitol

BILL MOYERS: It’s really a remarkable turn of

ANNE NELSON: They were kind of the godfathers, I

BILL MOYERS: Southern Baptists had long believed in

ANNE NELSON: Yeah, and I see that as tragic, because