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Climate deniers ejected from teachers conference for pro-carbon comic

At a meeting of science teachers, the CO2 Coalition handed out comic books depicting carbon as good for the planet. They got kicked out.

By Maxine Joselow

:{:{Updated April 11, 2023}:

Students measure a tree at Farragut State Park in Idaho to learn about the effects that trees have on the environment north of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho on May 18, 2017. (Rajah Bose/For The Washington Post)

To science teachers attending a recent convention, the comic books titled “Simon the Solar-Powered Cat” seemed unremarkable at first. Their story began with Simon, an orange-and-white cat, begging for more food in typical feline fashion.

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

But on Page 5, the story took an unusual turn: A “friendly scientist” explained that Simon subsisted not on kibble, but on carbon dioxide. The scientist concluded that CO2 was a “miracle molecule” that fueled all life on Earth by helping plants turn sunlight into food.

That message and the comic book were the brainchild of the CO2 Coalition, a group that rejects the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. The group claims that it distributed about 700 comic books to teachers at the National Science Teaching Association’s convention in Atlanta last month before being kicked out of the event.

“We were overwhelmed by the positive response from the teachers at the convention,” Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, said in an interview. “In fact, by the second day, we had handed out all of the comic books we had brought.”

The episode, details of which have not previously been reported, raised concerns among scientists and education experts that the teachers could spread climate misinformation to their students. It comes as states take divergent approaches to climate instruction in public schools, with New Jersey requiring students to learn about climate change in nearly every class and the Texas Board of Education calling for science textbooks to emphasize the “positive” effects of fossil fuels.

A large majority of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming by emitting massive amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Humanity must rapidly reduce these emissions, scientists say, or face catastrophic consequences such as dramatic sea level rise over the next few decades.

A page from a comic book from the CO2 Coalition, titled “Simon the Solar-Powered Cat.” (CO2 Coalition)

“By focusing 100 percent on this idea that plants need CO2, they’re intentionally misleading people by avoiding the real problems of CO2, which they didn’t talk about at all,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s kind of like if you’re talking about cigarettes, and all you talk about is how cool they make you look.”

The influence of climate denial groups has waned over the past several decades, as the science has become clearer and the impacts of global warming have become starker. But the Virginia-based CO2 Coalition, which describes its mission as informing policymakers and the public of the “important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy,” has persisted in spreading its message.

Members of the coalition, which has received money from far-right organizations and donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry, ran a booth at the National Science Teaching Association’s convention. They spent the first day distributing three comic books and accompanying lesson plans to some of the roughly 6,500 attendees.

All of the comics featured three young sisters named Sophia, Ariana and Elyssa — the owners of Simon the cat — and their neighbor, a scientist named Mr. Gordon. In a book titled “Once upon a time: A true story about the miracle molecule — carbon dioxide,” Gordon tells the sisters that CO2 has net benefits for the planet.

“Everything green in our very green world owes its existence to carbon dioxide,” Gordon says to them. “And every person and every animal … are built from the carbon in CO2, which we get from eating vegetables and meat.”

A character named Mr. Gordon touts the benefits of carbon dioxide in a comic book titled “Once upon a time: A true story about the miracle molecule — carbon dioxide.” (CO2 Coalition)

While it is true that CO2 helps plants grow, its accumulation in the atmosphere will have net negative effects for plants and people alike, Dessler said. Telling kids they need CO2 to survive, he said, “is like telling a drowning person they need water to survive. It’s not helpful.”

On the second day of the convention, an official with the National Science Teaching Association asked members of the CO2 Coalition to stop distributing their materials or leave, according to a uploaded by the coalition.

Global carbon dioxide emissions hit new highs last year, says IEA report

“You can take down your literature or you can go home — it’s your choice,” NSTA chief operating officer Ryan Foley says in the video. When Wrightstone refuses to comply, Foley responds, “All right, then you’re being kicked out. You should pack up and get out.”

Jakob Namson and Sarah Morris, with their class from Lake City High School, measure a tree at Farragut State Park in Idaho to learn about the effects that trees have on the environment north of Coeur d'Alene in 2017. (Rajah Bose for The Washington Post)

When coalition members requested a booth at the convention, they signed a contract certifying that their materials were consistent with the association’s position statement on the teaching of climate science, NSTA Executive Director Erika Shugart said in an email. But then they violated the contract, she said.

In addition to the comic books, she said, coalition members circulated a pamphlet that criticized the position statement, which recognizes the “overwhelming scientific consensus” that the “Earth’s climate is changing, largely due to human-induced increases in the concentrations of heat-absorbing gases” such as CO2.

Debating the science

The CO2 Coalition does not disclose its source of funding, and it declined to do so for this story. But in 2017, the coalition received $170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than $33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, according to tax filings obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, a watchdog group.

The Mercer Family Foundation — financed by New York hedge fund executive Robert Mercer and directed by his daughter Rebekah — has also helped finance the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has denounced climate science as rigged. Heartland in 2017 mailed some 200,000 teachers books titled “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.”

It remains unclear whether the Mercers have continued to fund the coalition. Wrightstone said in an email that although “we cannot release details on our funding sources,” the “vast majority” of donors are individuals making small contributions. While the CO2 Coalition paid an artist to create the comic books, the members of the group’s Education Committee are unpaid volunteers, he said.

These volunteers include William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who has challenged the idea that carbon dioxide could damage the planet. Under President Donald Trump, Happer served as a senior director on the National Security Council, where he oversaw a controversial initiative to reassess the federal government’s analysis of climate science.

Physicist William Happer in 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Sharon Camp, a retired high school science teacher, designed the lesson plans accompanying the comic books. One lesson encourages teachers to use beads, Legos or Styrofoam balls to help students visualize CO2 molecules.

Camp, who taught Advanced Placement environmental science at Walton High School in Marietta, Ga., for 15 years, said students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions about climate science. “This is the only branch of science where you are not allowed to debate, you are not allowed to question,” she said in an interview. “Science is not supposed to work that way.”

Climate in the classroom

The coalition’s efforts come as some states have failed to update their standards for teaching climate change in public schools, leaving students at risk of learning incorrect ideas.

How teachers are getting it wrong on climate change

In a 2020 report, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund graded all 50 states on their standards for teaching climate change. The groups examined whether the standards helped students understand that climate change is real, caused by humans, and already affecting nature and society, among other criteria.

Twenty-seven states scored a B+ or better. Of the rest, 20 scored a C+ or lower. In the coal state of West Virginia, the standards require students to debate climate change in their science classrooms, despite little debate among scientists. Those standards received a D. And in Alabama, which received an F, the standards suggest that human activity “may have caused” a rise in global temperatures, similarly downplaying the scientific consensus.

In March, the Republican-dominated Texas State Board of Education altered its internal guidance to say science textbooks should emphasize the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels, a leading cause of global warming. As a result, the state would probably still score an F if the report were conducted today, said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.

Some Democratic-led states have moved in the opposite direction. New Jersey in 2020 became the first state to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects.

In one state, every class teaches climate change — even P.E.

Shannon Falkner, an English teacher at Chatham High School in Chatham, N.J., said her freshman English students have written climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Some students have penned dystopian tales about flooded cities, while others have offered more hopeful stories about the nation’s transition to renewable energy. Falkner said the reaction from students has been largely positive, and no parents have complained about the assignment.

There is evidence that climate instruction is popular. About 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “schools should teach about global warming” in a 2021 poll by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication; about 22 percent disagreed.

“It’s actually one of the most supported policies we have measured,” said Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program. Both the CO2 Coalition and conservative policymakers, he said, “are standing in front of the tide of public opinion and trying to hold it back with a piece of cardboard.”

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family fdn desmog

Recipient Name 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Grand Total

Media Research Center $500,000 $1,000,000 $1,194,000 $1,800,000 $3,000,000 $2,972,420 $3,000,000 $3,000,000 $2,000,000 $2,000,000 $20,466,420

George W. Bush Foundation $1,000,000 $1,000,000 $100,000 $1,000,000 $5,000,000 $1,972,245 $10,072,245

The Stony Brook Foundation $2,186,215 $1,231,067 $1,263,938 $2,904,636 $2,099,970 $9,685,826

Government Accountability Institute $1,000,000 $1,000,000 $1,735,000 $2,000,000 $1,725,000 $7,460,000

Heartland Institute $1,000,000 $500,000 $370,000 $444,000 $912,000 $877,000 $885,000 $100,000 $800,000 $800,000 $6,688,000

The Federalist Society $1,600,000 $2,050,000 $2,300,000 $500,000 $6,450,000

Reclaim New York $75,000 $1,250,000 $1,600,000 $1,760,000 $4,685,000

Citizens United Foundation $2,000,000 $1,000,000 $550,000 $250,000 $3,800,000

Museum of Natural History $1,250,000 $575,000 $625,000 $625,000 $3,075,000

Donors Trust $2,250,000 $500,000 $2,750,000

Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine $60,000 $50,000 $50,000 $50,000 $100,000 $965,000 $200,000 $200,000 $200,000 $500,000 $2,375,000

Manhattan Institute for Policy Research $50,000 $100,000 $284,225 $400,000 $300,000 $300,000 $300,000 $450,000 $2,184,225

Heritage Foundation $500,000 $500,000 $500,000 $500,000 $2,000,000

George W. Bush Presidential Center $2,000,000 $2,000,000

Moving Pictures Institute $100,000 $300,000 $500,000 $800,000 $1,700,000

Success Academy Charter Schools $550,000 $500,000 $50,000 $550,000 $1,650,000

American Museum of Natural History $250,000 $1,350,000 $1,600,000

The Becket Fund $250,000 $250,000 $250,000 $250,000 $400,000 $1,400,000

Young America’s Foundation $50,000 $50,000 $1,100,000 $100,000 $1,300,000

Goldwater Institute $100,000 $250,000 $300,000 $300,000 $300,000 $1,250,000

Cato Institute $300,000 $300,000 $300,000 $300,000 $1,200,000

Illinois Policy Institute $100,000 $250,000 $250,000 $250,000 $250,000 $1,100,000

Home Depot Foundation $1,100,000 $1,100,000

Law Enforcement Agency Fund $231,600 $204,837 $635,802 $1,072,239

Cold Spring Harbor Lab $250,000 $750,000 $1,000,000

Hospital for Special Surgery $1,000,000 $1,000,000

Center for Union Facts $500,000 $250,000 $150,000 $900,000

King’s College $300,000 $300,000 $300,000 $900,000

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute $400,000 $400,000 $800,000

Susan B Anthony Education Fund $300,000 $500,000 $800,000

Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise $550,000 $250,000 $800,000

The Family Leader Foundation $750,000 $25,000 $775,000

Foundation for Cultural Review $25,000 $125,000 $150,000 $100,000 $150,000 $150,000 $700,000

Cherish Freedom Foundation $50,000 $305,000 $250,000 $50,000 $655,000

The Calvin Coolidge Foundation $25,000 $108,333 $273,000 $80,000 $130,000 $616,333

Newark Beth Israel Medical Center Foundation $500,000 $500,000

John Hancock Committee for the States $500,000 $500,000

Rev the Vote Foundation, Inc. $500,000 $500,000

Berkely Earth $250,000 $250,000 $500,000

The Barry Goldwater Institute $500,000 $500,000

World Science Festival $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $500,000

Cleveland 2016 Host Committee Inc. $500,000 $500,000

Cain Foundation $500,000 $500,000

American Transparency $250,000 $250,000 $500,000

Gatestone Institute $50,000 $100,000 $100,000 $200,000 $450,000

Empire Center for Public Policy $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $400,000

CO2 Coalition $150,000 $170,000 $320,000

National Youth Science Fund $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $300,000

Job Creators Alliance $100,000 $100,000 $100,000 $300,000

World Science Foundation $294,500 $294,500

Philanthropy Roundtable $10,000 $10,000 $260,000 $10,000 $290,000

American Principles Project $250,000 $25,000 $275,000

Council for National Policy $50,000 $50,000 $50,000 $50,000 $50,000 $25,000 $275,000

Families for Excellent Schools $250,000 $250,000

The American Conservative Union $250,000 $250,000

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute $200,000 $200,000

Reason Foundation $50,000 $50,000 $50,000 $150,000

London Center for Policy Research $150,000 $150,000

JDRF $132,000 $132,000

Math for America $125,000 $125,000

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change $125,000 $125,000

ACU Foundation $120,000 $120,000

Classroom Inc. $40,000 $40,000 $40,000 $120,000

Mount Sinai School of Medicine $115,000 $115,000

Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation $50,000 $50,000 $100,000

Columbus Zoo and Aquarium $100,000 $100,000

United States Common Sense $100,000 $100,000

Walking with the Wounded $100,000 $100,000

Alliance for School Choice $100,000 $100,000

Lincoln Network $100,000 $100,000

Patton Foundation $100,000 $100,000

State Policy Network $50,000 $50,000 $100,000

Special Operations Warrior Foundation $85,000 $2,905 $87,905

Women’s Sports Foundation $45,000 $15,000 $25,000 $85,000

LPD Commission International $75,000 $75,000

American Association for Aerosol Research $4,000 $4,000 $4,000 $12,000 $4,000 $13,000 $30,000 $71,000

Historical Royal Places Inc. $60,000 $60,000

Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation $55,000 $55,000

International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals $50,000 $50,000

Encounter for Culture and Education $25,000 $25,000 $50,000

Silver Hill Hospital $25,000 $25,000 $50,000

American Educational Foundation Inc. $50,000 $50,000

Mayo Clinic $50,000 $50,000

Wildlife Conservation Society $20,000 $25,000 $45,000

The Frick Collection $20,000 $20,000 $40,000

Doctors of the World $40,000 $40,000

Texas Freedom Network $5,000 $5,000 $5,000 $5,000 $10,000 $30,000

Community Foundation of Hudson Valley $25,010 $25,010

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute $25,000 $25,000

The Anglosphere Society $25,000 $25,000

Vision Mexico $25,000 $25,000

9-1-1 Veterans Inc. $25,000 $25,000

James Madison Center for Free Speech $25,000 $25,000

World Wildlife Fund $20,000 $20,000

The Land Trust of Napa County $20,000 $20,000

The Leadership Institute $15,000 $15,000

The Peconic Land Trust $15,000 $15,000

Ovarian Cancer Research $15,000 $15,000

Compact for American Education Foundation $13,500 $13,500

The Leadership Foundation $10,000 $10,000

New York Botanical Garden $10,000 $10,000

Londonderry Volunter Rescue Squad $10,000 $10,000

St. Judge’s Children Hospital $10,000 $10,000

The Rockefeller University $10,000 $10,000

William F Buckley Jr Program $10,000 $10,000

The Fund for American Studies $10,000 $10,000

Massachusetts General Cancer Center $10,000 $10,000

FlowerPower Foundation $5,000 $5,000

Ladies in Red

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ref

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/04/how-one-billionaire-family-bankrolled-election-lies-white-nationalism--and-the-capitol-riot/

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How one billionaire family bankrolled election lies, white nationalism — and the Capitol riot

Rebekah Mercer is “one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement,” says longtime GOP insider Steve Schmidt

By IGOR DERYSH

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Four years before Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pumped his fist to a supportive mob that would soon overrun the Capitol Police and hunt lawmakers through the halls of Congress, the former Missouri attorney general needed a deep-pocketed patron. Naturally, he called on the man who helped bankroll former President Donald Trump's rise: hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, whom he would soon describe as a friend while name-dropping him to court support from far-right figures like Steve Bannon, a longtime Mercer ally. It's unclear what came of Hawley's meeting with Mercer, but the Club for Growth, which has received millions from the Mercer family, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, which also got Mercer donations, quickly became Hawley's biggest financial backers, by far. Mercer's daughter Rebekah kicked in a near-maximum donation to his 2018 Senate campaign for good measure.

While Charles Koch and his late brother David have dominated Republican fundraising in recent decades, the Mercers' recent strategic investments in far-right candidates bought them a disproportionate level of influence in the Republican Party before culminating in an effort to subvert the election that fueled the deadly Capitol siege

"The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution," Bannon told The New Yorker in 2017. "Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs." Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, sees it differently. Rebekah Mercer, he said in an interview with Salon, is the "chief financier or one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement, and that's what it is."

Hours after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, killing five people and injuring dozens of police officers in a futile bid to stop the counting of electoral votes, Hawley joined with top Mercer beneficiaries in objecting to the results to back Trump's "big lie" that the election was somehow stolen. There was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose super PAC got $13.5 million from the Mercers during the 2016 presidential campaign — before the family dropped another $15.5 million to back Trump. There was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., defending the majority of the GOP House caucus voting to overturn legal election results after his Congressional Leadership Fund received $1.5 million from the Mercers. And there was Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who received $21,600 from the Mercers before speaking at the rally that preceded the riot and objecting to the results. Brooks was later named by "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander as having helped orchestrate the event, though his office said he has "no recollection communicating in any way with whoever Ali Alexander is.

Alexander himself may have benefited from the Mercers' millions while working for the Black Conservative Fund, a small and mysterious group that received $60,000 from Robert Mercer in 2016. Though the group did not raise any money in 2020, it promoted the White House rally to tens of thousands of followers, according to CNBC.

The Mercers funded numerous key players who helped foment the Jan. 6 insurrection, though their full involvement remains unclear.Along with far-right candidates and groups, they have also funded the far-right social network Parler, which was used to coordinate the Capitol siege, and Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct London-based data firm that stole Facebook user data to help Trump's 2016 campaign target potential voters.

"As I discovered first-hand, the Mercers are exceptionally skillful at obfuscating and masking their political enterprises," David Carroll, a professor at The New School in Manhattan who sued Cambridge Analytica for his data in London, said in an email to Salon. "I marveled at how their ownership of Cambridge Analytica was effectively shielded from the U.K. courts where they were prosecuted."

Now that the Mercers have survived the scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission and former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, Carroll added, "I would assume the family has doubled-down on investing in its own privacy."

Schmidt agreed that "it's hard to keep track of the money" the Mercers have doled out to their pet causes.

"In this movement, the money is a fundamentally important part of it. It fuels the movement and that movement is an extremist movement," he said. "Is there a better than even chance that the Mercer money is flowing, like so many tributaries, right into a larger seditious stream on this? Of course there is."

Lax laws surrounding dark money donated to nonprofit entities mean it will likely be "several years before the public will have a complete sense of how much the Mercers spent," wrote The Intercept's Matthew Cunningham-Cook.

Publicly available data shows that the Mercers helped fund numerous players who pushed the "big lie." The family donated $3.8 million to Citizens United, which is run by longtime Trump adviser David Bossie, who was tapped to lead the former president's legal challenges. Though the Mercers have pulled back their financial support in recent election cycles amid growing scrutiny, they donated $300,000 during this past cycle to the Republican National Committee, which joined Trump's legal battle.

The Mercers were also the top donors to Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward, a devoted Trump loyalist, The Intercept reported last week. Ward joined the lawsuit led by the Republican attorney general of Texas that sought to overturn the results of the election in multiple states and spoke at a December rally that featured Alexander to push Trump's election conspiracy theories. On Twitter, Ward promoted her appearance at a "Stop the Steal" rally alongside former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the election, and posted the hashtag "#CrossTheRubicon," a phrase that refers to Julius Caesar marching his army into Rome to declare himself a dictator. The Arizona GOP also promoted Alexander's tweets, which included his declaration that he was "willing to give up my life for this fight."

"Live for nothing, or die for something," the party tweeted about a month before the Capitol riot.

More recently, Rebekah Mercer co-founded Parler, ostensibly a "libertarian" moderation-free social network that quickly became a megaphone for far-right figures like Alexander and fellow organizer Alex Jones, both of whom had been banned from mainstream social networks for spreading disinformation. Alexander, Jones and others used Parler to spread falsehoods about the election while others simply trafficked in white supremacist content, according to the Anti-Defamation League. "Holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry are also easy to find,"the ADL said.

Parler was used by some of the Capitol rioters to plan and coordinate the attack. The site was briefly taken offline by Amazon before finding a new host, though its apps have been removed from the Apple and Google app stores.Rebekah Mercer said in a Parler post that she started the social network to combat the "increasing tyranny" of our "tech overlords," slamming mainstream social networks over "data mining" — which is exactly what the Mercers' former company, Cambridge Analytica, exploited to steal Facebook users' personal data to help Trump in 2016. Although Mercer touted Parler's protection of user data, hackers were able to easily gain access to unsecured user data, which showed that Parler users had penetrated deep inside the Capitol and shared videos and photos of their crimes.

Before Trump, the family for years bankrolled Breitbart News, formerly run by Steve Bannon, who affectionately termed it the platform of the alt-right. Along with Breitbart, which received a $10 million investment from the family, the Mercers also funded Bannon projects like Glittering Steel, a film production company, and the Government Accountability Institute, whose president authored the anti-Hillary bestseller "Clinton Cash" and later pushed discredited conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and his son Hunter's work overseas. Bannon's appointment to Trump's White House, after Rebekah Mercer pushed for him to take over Trump's campaign, was celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party. Though Bannon fell out with Trump after a few months in the White House, both he and Breitbart aggressively pushed Trump's false narrative following the election.

The Mercers also funded conservative groups that helped push Trump's election lies and spread hate. An analysis by Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative, which researches the spread of Islamophobia, extensively detailed the Mercers' donations to groups that promote "racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism," and that have since moved on to pushing election conspiracy theories.

In 2017, the Mercers donated $200,000 to the Gatestone Institute,where Rebekah Mercer sat on the board of governors. The group spent years pushing anti-Islam writings before echoing Trump's baseless fraud claims following the election. That same year, the Mercers gave $1.725 million and another $500,000 the following year to the Bannon-founded Government Accountability Institute, whose research director Eric Eggers pushed unfounded fraud claims on Sean Hannity's radio show. In 2018, they gave $8.1 million to DonorsTrust, which later donated $1.5 million to the white nationalist group VDARE, which subsequently promoted conspiracy theories about the election.

"Any examination of the growth of the far-right today in the U.S. must take into account the role of the Mercer family," said Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at Bridge who authored the report, in an email to Salon. "Rebekah Mercer, in particular, has provided financial support to politicians who amplify white nationalist sentiments, and platforms like Breitbart and Parler that magnify far-right conspiracy theories."

Tazamal added that the Capitol riot should not be understood as "an organic event" but rather as a "coordinated attack."

"By strategically funneling millions into known hate groups, platforms amplifying racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, and politicians who pushed forth outright lies of a stolen election, Rebekah Mercer played a role in inciting the violence by providing material support," she said. "The billionaire family has used their extraordinary wealth to bankroll the rise of violent white nationalism in this country."

Rebekah Mercer defended herself in a 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed, claiming that she "welcomes immigrants and refugees" and rejects "any discrimination based on race, gender, creed, ethnicity or sexual orientation," despite repeatedly funding lawmakers and groups accused of trafficking hate. She said she supported Trump "because he promised to tackle entrenched corruption on both sides of the aisle," even though he did far more to fill the swamp than drain it. She insisted that she had "no editorial authority" at Breitbart and argued that Bannon took the outlet in the "wrong direction," though The New Yorker reported that the family had invested $10 million in the outlet on the condition that Bannon would be placed on the company's board. The report also said that she is "highly engaged" with the site's content and "often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention."

"She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos," a source told the outlet.

The Mercers were also the principal patrons for far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos. After Yiannopoulos was fired by Breitbart for comments defending pedophilia, he received a wire transfer from Robert Mercer's accountant, according to BuzzFeed News. "Rebekah Mercer loves Milo," a source told the outlet. "They always stood behind him, and their support never wavered."

Politico in 2016 dubbed Rebekah Mercer the "most powerful woman in GOP politics." Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy, whose outlet also pushed the "big lie," labeled Mercer the "first lady of the alt-right." Though her father signed the large checks, Politico reported, it's Rebekah Mercer who is "running the family operation" and whose "frustration" with the Koch brothers' donor network — in which the Mercers previously participated — led her to start a "rival operation."

Rebekah Mercer heads the Mercer family's foundation, which donated $35 million to right-wing think tanks and policy groups between 2009 and 2014, according to the Washington Post. It marked a massive shift for the family, which donated just $37,800 in 2006, including a $4,200 check from Robert Mercer's wife Diana to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. The election of Barack Obama changed everything, leading the family to pump at least $77 million in political donations into conservative candidates and causes between 2008 and 2016. Though their early forays into politics in New York and Oregon were utter failures, and Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign crumbled under the weight of relentless attacks from Trump and general bipartisan disdain, their investment in Trump quickly paid dividends.

Rebekah Mercer reportedly led a major reorganization of Trump's 2016 campaign, connecting him with Bannon and former Cruz adviser Kellyanne Conway, who would replace Paul Manafort at the helm of the team. Mercer, who also served on the Trump transition's executive committee, pushed for Trump to hire Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who was forced to resign less than a month into Trump's presidency amid a criminal investigation and now spreads QAnon conspiracy theories online.

It's unclear why the Mercers fund so many far-right causes, though sources close to the family told Politico in 2016 that they "harbor a deep and abiding enmity toward the political establishment."Robert Mercer has been described as a "reclusive" former IBM computer scientist who made his fortune as co-CEO of the algorithmic trading company Renaissance Technologies. Sources close to him told The New Yorker that he is a conspiracy theorist who believes the Clintons had opponents murdered and were involved in a drug-running ring with the CIA. He has also described the Civil Rights Act as a mistake, arguing that Black people were better off financially before the passage of the landmark law, according to the same New Yorker report. Racism in the U.S. is "exaggerated," Mercer reportedly said, attributing most of it to "Black racists." He has likewise argued that climate change is not a problem and would actually be beneficial for the Earth, sources told the magazine.

"Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make," David Magerman, a former colleague of Mercer who later sued him for unlawful termination, told the New Yorker. "A cat has value, he's said, because it provides pleasure to humans.But if someone is on welfare they have negative value.If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he's a thousand times more valuable."

Magerman warned in an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that Mercer was "effectively buying shares in the candidate."

"Robert Mercer now owns a sizable share of the United States Presidency," he wrote.

While painting herself as a philanthropist who supports small government and personal responsibility, Rebekah Mercer, who reportedly home-schools her four children in a $28 million Trump-branded apartment in New York, described the state of the country in apocalyptic termsin a 2019 book first flagged by The Intercept.

"[W]hat is the state of [the American] experiment today?" Mercer asked. "'Now we are engaged in a great civil war,' said Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863. One hundred and fifty-five years later, it is barely hyperbolic to echo the Great Emancipator." She added, "We are not yet in armed conflict, but we are facing an ever more belligerent, frantic, and absurd group of radicals in a struggle for the soul of our country."

The report added that the Mercers own Centre Firearms, a company that claims to have the "country's largest private cache of machine guns," and has a Queens warehouse filled with guns and "an Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher, capable of hurling 60 explosives per minute."

The Mercers' extremist sympathies set them apart from other big Republican donors like the Kochs, whom Schmidt described as transactional limited-government ideologues who "got none of what they were seeking" from their Republican funding.

The Kochs "wanted conservative governance," said Schmidt, who was senior strategist for Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. "They didn't get that. They got big government, they got big-spending, out-of-control government, led by the Republican Party. That's the complete opposite of what they invested in."

But the Mercers "invested in a different cause," he added.

"That cause is not a democratic cause. It's not a limited-government cause. It seems that the Mercers invested in chaos and they got exactly what they wanted. It seems like they invested in someone who didn't believe in American democracy, and they got someone who tried to burn it down."

IGOR DERYSH

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

Tips/Email: iderysh@salon.com Twitter: @IgorDerysh

---

the whole story:

medium .com

https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06

no lnx

A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica

Bridging the Atlantic to bring radical nativists of Trump & Brexit together via military tech & ad money, one donation or dataset at a time.

May 19, 2017 · 46 min read

Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive role in the Trump digital marketing team’s self-proclaimed voter suppression rollout was the culmination of several years of preparation by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their own profit power.

As a direct result of the reporting led by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica is already under active investigation for violating United Kingdom data protection laws, as related to their involvement with Leave.EU. It’s unclear if anything will come of this, as Leave’s ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ seem quite confident they were able to skate through some loopholes and use some creative accounting to their advantage.

Separate issues have been under the microscope of UK authorities. For example, one is the improper collection & use of voters’ personal data via the internet for political marketing/advertising purposes, and another is the question of foreign (read: non-UK) money being used to fund the Leave campaigns. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of the data inquiry, and US-based stock trader Robert Mercer has been identified as the primary source of the foreign money, but in both cases political media production & dissemination is the underlying issue.

Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.

Still, the fire rises.

Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium

1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…

medium.com

PROFIT BOTS

Bannon & Bossie began releasing their political issue advocacy film collaborations in 2010, months after Bossie’s Citizens United v FEC case received its big Supreme Court victory, but they were among many looking to exploit the new election [de]regulations. One such up-and-coming major player was half-billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer had won awards in his first career, working for IBM’s Watson AI project in the field of natural language processing, where he wrote code teaching computers how to understand humans. The avid yachtsman changed tacks slightly in 1993, as he went on to make his sudden fortune with the wildly profitable private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, also known as RenTec, of which he is now co-CEO. Its stock-in-trade, if you will, is using quantitative analysis and high frequency trading (HFT) to win big on the global financial markets.

Quantitative analysis is a blanket term that covers a range of techniques, but the basic idea is to execute financial transactions based on predictions made by calculating large groups of historical alphanumeric sets; i.e., using existing patterns to predict future outcomes. When you’re anticipating future numbers, you might naturally expect to first inspect past numbers.

However, the standard human brain can only do so much these days, so the vast majority of work involved in this field is performed by computers. Even experts in the field — unsurprisingly called ‘quants’, though RenTec is known for exclusively employing mathematicians, physicists, and cryptographers — are still only able to quickly & accurately calculate a small grouping of historical variables. As a result, giant datasets — consisting of any number of different variables tracked over time — are fed into computers which calculate them using complex math equations, following repeatable series of preprogrammed steps that are known as algorithms.

Not only do quants employ algorithms to spit out robotically identified market trends, but they frequently direct the algorithms to buy and sell stocks all on their own. This outsourcing of labor is known as algorithmic trading, and since the computers involved are usually employing algorithms on both sides of these transactions, the trades can happen incredibly quickly (nanoseconds) and in high volumes (around half of all US equity trades). Now we’re describing the quant subgenre of high frequency trading.

HFT is very controversial within the financial industry, with supporters saying it helps keep the markets liquid & transparent and detractors saying it increases volatility, but it’s probably safe to say most outside observers think it’s very dangerous. It’s been responsible for “flash crashes”; allowed for massive accumulations of private wealth for no reason other than automated exploitation of loopholes, timezones, and bandwidth; played a sizable (or at least very profitable) role in the 2008 global financial meltdown; and put the planet’s resources under the control of larval artificial intelligence.

For these reasons, it should be no surprise HFT came under the scrutiny of regulators, but only after a decade of algorithmic trading that was enabled by the 2000 changeover to stock decimalization (pricing shares by pennies instead of quarter-dollars). The EU had been fairly vigilant in that regard, but the US government hadn’t pricked up its ears until after the July 2009 arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, for allegedly stealing ‘proprietary’ algorithms from his employer Goldman Sachs.

Aleynikov was accused of sticking his digital avatar hand into the “black box” — the batches of algorithms that are kept secret by HFT firms — of Goldman Sachs, but his still-active case has been in & out of courts for these past 8 years, partially because some of the laws he broke had not yet been fully written. That genre of legislative inefficiency sparked the interest of Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, which in turn caught the eyes of quants and black box houses like RenTec.

4 minutes of HFT

DeFazio spearheaded the idea of a financial transactions tax — to impose a micropercent tax on trades that would only affect the high-volume HFT in any tangible way— and teamed up with a couple colleagues to bring bills to the floor of Congress. He got nowhere in 2009, two years after the “Quant Quake”, nor in 2010, even after the May 6th “Flash Crash” again alerted the public to the dangers of HFT. Despite the failure to ignite substantial interest, his dedication to reform did not go unnoticed.

TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED

DeFazio’s 2010 reelection campaign was nearly derailed by the appearance of highly-funded ads which attacked him and supported his ‘Tea Party’ Republican opponent, Art Robinson. Created by a PAC calling itself Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA), it had been an ongoing mystery at the time as to who put up the big money for that organization. Only a few weeks before the election, as per the then-newly lax criteria set forth by the Citizens United decision earlier that year, was it revealed that one of the only two funders was Mr Robert Mercer, who contributed $643,750.

Investigation by the Washington Post prior to the reveal turned up even more curiosities, including a denial of the existence of CTA by a PR rep standing in the doorway of its registered address and directly to DeFazio’s face. Also, we should not be surprised to learn CTA’s treasurer was Jason Miller, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign communications director starting 30 June 2016. Miller was briefly named White House communications director in December 2016, before recusing himself a few days later after a fellow campaign worker accused the otherwise married Miller of fathering her unborn child.

Mercer’s attacks on DeFazio are easily attributable to HFT tax proposals, but his support of political then-novice Art Robinson is also notable. Robinson is a crackpot pseudoscientist whose mentor was Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling, before they acrimoniously parted ways in a divorce which ultimately ended in Robinson’s $25.5m lawsuit against the Pauling Institute (which he settled for $575k).

Robinson then became a supporter of homeopathic disease cures via exposure to raw radioactive elements, as well as a well-known climate change denier, an obsessive hoarder of 14,000+ human urine samples, and a forest-dwelling widower who homeschooled his 6 children using his own Bible-based, available-for-sale “Robinson Curriculum” (all of which basically makes him the Anti-Captain Fantastic). He lost to DeFazio in 2010 and lost again & again & again in 3 subsequent elections, but managed to become the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party from 2013–15, and has recently been considered for the role of Trump’s chief Science Adviser.

Robert Mercer and his politically powerful daughter Rebekah are said to have become fans of Robinson’s after reading his newsletter “Access to Energy”, which argues such things as Chernobyl radiation and carbon pollution are ultimately beneficial to planetary life. However, Mercer has privately “downplay[ed] the dangers posed by nuclear war” when excitedly expressing his belief that Hiroshima & Nagasaki radiation made the greater population of Japan healthier, and Robinson has published a book & multi-DVD set on Nuclear War Survival Skills, so they have that hobby in common.

After bringing someone like Robinson close to victory in 2010, the Mercers’ fresh taste for political power brought them the privileges and lifestyles of the rich & famous. They soon found themselves at a 2011 conference of the Club For Growth, a pro-business activist group for the conservative elite, which spent $6m of its own in support of 2010 GOP/Tea Party contenders. The Club is perhaps best known for being sued and fined by the FEC in 2005 for violating fair election laws. Its Executive Director David Keating then formed SpeechNow, a group which sued the FEC and did even more damage to campaign finance regulations via their Ninth Circuit Court victory in the immediate wake of Citizens United v FEC, but right now we’re focused on the Club as the place where Mercer first met Andrew Breitbart.

BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN...

fnd 12/17

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/201982204/201803199349105420/full

990

HEARTLAND INSTITUE

19 SO LASALLE STE 903

CHICAGO,IL60603 NON PROFIT DONATION 800,000

MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

CPW 79TH STREET

NEW YORK,NY10024 NON PROFIT DONATION 625,000

MEDIA RESERACH CENTER

1900 CAMPUS COMMONS DRIVE

RESTON,VA20191 NON PROFIT DONATION 2,000,000

MANHATTAN INST FOR POLICY RESEARCH

52 VANDERBILT AVENUE

SUITE 201

NEW YORK,NY10017 NON PROFIT DONATION 450,000

FOUNDATION FOR CULTURAL REVIEWING

THE NEW CRITERION

900 BROADWAY

SUITE 602

NEW YORK,NY10003 NON PROFIT DONATION 150,000

THE BECKET FUND

1200 NEW HAMPSHIRE AVE NW

SUITE 700

WASHINGTON,DC20036 NON PROFIT DONATION 400,000

THE CALVIN COOLIDGE FOUNDATION

3780 VERMONT 100A

PLYMOUTH,VT05056 NON PROFIT DONATION 130,000

LAW ENFORCEMENT EDUCATION FUND

667 EAST BIG BEAVER ROAD

SUITE 205

TROY,MI48083 NON PROFIT DONATION 635,802

OISM

PO BOX 1279

CAVE JUNCTION,OR97523 NON PROFIT DONATION 500,000

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY INSTITUTE

TALLAHASSE

TALLAHASSEE,FL32301 NON PROFIT DONATION 1,725,000

CATO INSTITUTE

100 MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW

WASHINGTON,DC20001 NON PROFIT DONATION 300,000

SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOLS

95 PINE STREET

NEW YORK,NY10005 NON PROFIT DONATION 550,000

GATESTONE INSTITUTE

750 3RD AVENUE

NEW YORK,NY100172703 NON PROFIT DONATION 200,000

RECLAIM NEW YORK INC

597 5TH AVENUE

SUITE 2703

NEW YORK,NY10017 NON PROFIT DONATION 1,760,000

CENTER FOR UNION FACTS

1090 VERMONT AVE NW

SUITE 800

WASHINGTON,DC200054961 NON PROFIT DONATION 150,000

TEXAS FREEDOM NETWORK

PO BOX 1624

AUSTIN,TX73301 NON PROFIT DONTAION 10,000

DONORS TRUST

1800 DIAGONAL RD S-280

ALEXANDRIA,VA22314 NON PROFIT DONATION 500,000

MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES RESERACH INST

UCLA-BERKELEY CAMPUS

17 GAUSS WAY

BERKELEY,CA94720 NON PROFIT DONATION 400,000

CO2 COALITION

1621 NORTH KENT ST 603

ARLINGTON,VA22209 NON PROFIT DONATION 170,000

THE FRICK COLLECTION

1E 70TH STREET

NEW YORK,NY10021 NON PROFIT DONATION 20,000

THE FAMILY LEADER FOUNDATION

PO BOX 42245

URBANDALE,IA50323 NON PROFIT DONATION 25,000

EMPRIE CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY

150 BROADWAY

SUITE 404

MENANDS,NY12204 NON PROFIT DONATION 100,000

JDRF

26 BROADWAY

14TH FLOOR

NEW YORK,NY10004 NON-PROFIT DONATION 132,000

WORLD SCIENCE FOUNDATION

475 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

STE 950

NEW YORK,NY10115 NON-PROFIT DONATION 294,500

AMERICAN ASSOC FOR AEROSOL RESEACH

11130 SUNRISE VALLEY DRIV

STE 350

RESTON,VA20191 NON-PROFIT DONATION 30,000

THE ANGLOSPHERE SOCIETY

625 WYNDEMERE AVENUE

RIDGEWOOD,NJ07450 NON-PROFIT DONATION 25,000

THE ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT LEGAL INST

1155 15TH ST NW 900

WASHINGTON,DC20005 NON-PROFIT DONATION 200,000

VISION MEXICO

1514 HAWTHORNE

EL PASO,TX79902 NON-PROFIT DONATION 25,000

SUSAN B ANTHONY LIST INC ED FD

2800 S SHIRLINGTON RD

STE 1200

ARLINGTON,VA22206 NON PROFIT DONATION 500,000

NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

2900 SOUTHERN BLVD

BRONX,NY104585126 NON-PROFIT DONATION 10,000

THE PECONIC LAND TRUST

296 HAMPTON ROAD

SOUTHAMPTON,NY11968 NON PROFIT DONATION 15,000

THE LEADERSHIP INSTITIUTE

1101 NORTH HIGHLAND ST

ARLINGTON,VA22201 NON PROFIT DONATION 15,000

AMERICAN PRINCIPALS PROJECT

2800 SHIRLINGTON ROAD

STE 1201

ARLINGTON,VA22206 NON PROFIT DONATION 25,000

THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY

1015 18TH STREET NW

WASHINGTON,DC20036 NON PROFIT DONATION 500,000

COLD SPRING HARBOR LAB

1 BUNGTOWN ROAD

COLD SPRING HARBOR,NY11724 NON PROFIT DONATION 750,000

UNITED STATES COMMON SENSE

2483 OLD MIDDLEFIELD WAY

MOUNTAN VIEW,CA94043 NON PROFIT DONATION 100,000

HOSPITAL FOR SPECIAL SURGERY

535 EAST 70TH STREET

NEW YORK,NY10021 NON PROFIT DONATION 1,000,000

Total .................................bullet 3a 15,222,302

TEXTIFIRE

May 19, 2017

Our previous article looked at the undertold history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly influential American political media & advertising from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue just prior to where we left off. SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist. Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.

Still, the fire rises.

Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium

1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…

medium.com

PROFIT BOTS

4 minutes of HFT]

TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED

BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN

Three years after meeting Steve Bannon in 2004 — at the Beverly Hills movie premiere of Bannon’s directorial debut In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed — Breitbart left The Drudge Report to start his own media outlet, Breitbart News, which he said was intended to be “unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.” Breitbart rapidly became the darling of the ultraconservatives and elbowed his way into mainstream relevance, becoming a driving force in the 2009–10 rise of the explicitly anti-Obama Tea Party.

With their respective stars on the rise, it’s impossible to know who was more smitten with whom at the Spring 2011 Club For Growth meeting, but Breitbart took enough interest in the Mercers to later introduce them to his man Bannon. Having been with Breitbart News since its inception, Bannon ended up hitting it off with the Mercers and they immediately joined forces. In June 2011, the Mercers invested $10m in Breitbart, becoming co-owners in the process, but one of their contract stipulations demanded that their brand new friend Bannon be promoted to the board of directors.

Bannon & Breitbart, aka the Three Men and A Baby ghost

Around that same time in 2011, the 42yo Breitbart suffered a heart attack. Within a year, he collapsed on an L.A. street and died on 1 March 2012, with his autopsy blaming another massive heart attack due to an enlarged heart. Later that very same day, Bannon has said he met with New York investors to plan the future of Breitbart News, and he would quickly be named Executive Chairman on 19 March.

This was a crucial time period for all of these players. In February 2012, Bannon founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) with $2m in seed funding from the Mercers. Rebekah Mercer became Chairwoman, and Bannon installed Peter Schweizer — author of Reagan’s War, the book adapted into Bannon’s first “documentary” — as president of GAI. Like Bossie and Mercer, Schweizer is yet another Clinton-hating, Reagan-adoring, tax reform & financial deregulation advocate and conspiracy theorist.

A couple of the first ‘reports’ out of the gate for GAI: a treatise attesting to the horrors of food stamps, as well as another which itemized every instance of President Barack Obama’s attendance at his daily briefings. Breitbart predictably publishes multiple stories each time GAI puts out a press release, but both of those early missives were picked up for publication and discussion in major media outlets, such as ABC News, Washington Times, National Review, and Washington Post.

Peter Schweizer on Russia Today

What we’ll call ‘Mercer Money’ was also funneled into Citizens United’s coffers, to the tune of another 2 million dollars. This cash was at least partly used to fund Bannon & Bossie’s 4th Citizens United Productions collaboration, The Hope and the Change, an anti-Obama movie which premiered at the August Republican National Convention and played in theatres & on cable TV up through Election Day. Once again, the Citizens United v FEC decision enabled that release schedule.

And yet despite all of this intrigue, perhaps the most important development and deployment of Mercer Money in 2012 came in the form of a $5,000,000 investment in a relatively unknown British defense contractor, then called Strategic Communication Laboratories Ltd but now known as SCL Group. The Mercers tossed the pounds across the pond to enable data analytics research, with Rebekah wanting a “results-oriented consultant.”

This investment has been noted elsewhere as a natural fit for Robert Mercer, as his background in algorithms and language processing mesh with what we now know about SCL’s recent use of big data to enhance electioneering communications, but that actually didn’t yet make sense at the time. Back then, the only technology strongly tied to SCL would have been communications hardware (as opposed to database software), but only as one aspect of their rather straightforward advertising-cum-propaganda tactics.

SCL had worked on some elections, in a few war zones, and for the Pentagon over the years, with perhaps their most notable appearance being in 2004 Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution (allegedly on behalf of the vested interests of British intelligence, according to one untrustworthy source, as previously noted by TEXTIFIRE).

SCL carries a Secret clearance as a ‘List X’ contractor for the British Ministry of Defence and had always portrayed themselves as experts in the field of behavioral dynamics and psychological warfare, but had no known background in the algorithmic data processing with which they are now associated.

So why would an ill-equipped foreign defense contractor like SCL be called upon by the Mercers to do big data research? The answer again appears to lie somewhere in the weeds near Steve Bannon.

Header for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)]

WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?

Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation. He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in with Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural comrade in arms.

UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populist messaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.

Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C. During this trip, Bannon introduced Farage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions, the then-senator from Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.

Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”

Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]

Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011, after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others down with him.

One of those affected was yet another powerful hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.

Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”

Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]

ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members, to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”

Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.” In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.

Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director for Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.

Gordon was slightly controversial when he originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia. Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former Heritage Foundation manager.

J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom Gordon wrote a pro-Trump Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’ deputy, allegedly traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow. Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.

(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio]

Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member, and anti-immigration crusader, he was on board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he endorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.

A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times. Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.

“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]

DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner & cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that night included LifeZette’s Laura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannon had been partially living at the Embassy since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”

But regardless of the precise circumstances by which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his friendship with UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be unsurprised to learn it was allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.

PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM

In October 2012, a month before Mitt Romney’s loss initiated the Bannon-driven deposit of Mercer Money toward new election management technology, a Strategic Communication Laboratories subsidiary named SCL Elections was registered in the UK. All company shares were initially owned by Alexander Nix, Director of SCL Group and public face of the conglomerate, but its first and current Managing Director is Mark Turnbull.

Turnbull had previously worked for the tremendously influential public relations and strategic communications firm Bell Pottinger — co-founded by infamous PR guru Lord Timothy Bell — spending 18 years at the company. In 2004, he founded and led Bell Pottinger Public Advocacy (BPPA, fka Bell Pottinger Special Projects), which claimed to specialize in “understanding and influencing the human and social dynamics of conflict and cooperation…[using]…people’s identities, interests, networks and narratives that are the focal point for communications designed to deliver measurable change in support of political, social, developmental or military objectives.”

Bell Pottinger (B-PC) landed a 2004 Pentagon contract in Iraq devoted to manufacturing pro-Coalition media — including in-house advertising, video production, and paid placement of newspaper/TV/radio news items — in support of post-Saddam Hussein nation building and anti-Daesh messaging. The creative team of BPPA collaborated on the media directly with US military intelligence, with the crews working side-by-side in the most highly secured locations, such as Baghdad’s Camp Victory.

Though initially intended to be a 4-month contract, first granted by Ian Tunnicliffe’s Office of Strategic Communications of the Coalition Provisional Authority under USA’s pseudo-viceroy of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the project ultimately extended all the way to 2011. Upwards of 40 ‘stratcom’ companies — including BKSH & Associates, formed from the ashes of Black, Manafort, and Stone — followed B-PC’s lead, creating a veritable vortex of political propaganda and psychological operations experimentation. B-PC came out as the big winner of the free-for-all, as by the end of its time in Iraq, B-PC’s contract payouts had ballooned from US$5.8m to a total of $540m–660m.

Also present in Iraq during those years was a specialized British Armed Forces tri-service unit, the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, formerly known as Shadow. Its stated objective was to “influence attitudes in order to affect behaviour” with “planned, culturally sensitive, truthful and attributable activities directed and disseminated by various means to an approved target audience.” It drew from the Army, Navy & Air Force, seeking out Reserves who were also “TV & film producers, camera operators, radio presenters, [and] graphic designers/illustrators for print/web.”

Two important members of 15 (UK) PSYOPS (aka 15 POG) were Stephen Jolly of the Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham, both graduates of Cambridge University-affiliated schools. A linguistic scientist, certified psyops planner, and instructor for 15 POG, Jolly went on to serve as the UK’s Director of Defence Communications, starting in Dec 2012. He retired in 2015 as the most senior serving psyops officer in British Defence, moving on to become Fellow of the UK Defence Academy and Fellow in Communications at the Cambridge University Judge Business School.

As Defence Comms Director, Jolly embraced the new ‘Army 2020’ holistic reform initiative, pushing a “full spectrum” approach which combines the fields of public relations, media operations, information operations (IO) and psyops. This led to the creation of the 77th Brigade of the British Army, which absorbed several specialized units, including the 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group. Its establishment received a fair amount of media coverage, due to the claim it would partially focus on utilizing social media to wage the ‘dark arts’ of asymmetric warfare, but its ?1 Column focuses on “the behavioural analysis of actors, audiences and adversaries.”

Commander Steve Tatham served with 15 POG in Iraq, but commanded its Afghanistan regiment for years. He also plied his trade as Director of Communication Research at the UK Defence Academy, and was the UK’s longest continuously serving Influence Activities officer. Upon retirement he became Director of Operations at IOTA-Global, a UK company owned by Nigel Oakes, the founder of SCL and its research arm, Behavioural Dynamics Institute (BDi).

Grown just outside battlefields across the globe, Tatham designed a course titled “Target Audience Analysis” for the National Defence Academy of Latvia on behalf of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, teaching several agencies how to counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe. Originally a 9-week intensive training, delivered as a collaboration between IOTA-Global, BDi, and SCL Defence (formerly an SCL Group subsidiary), Tatham has repeated the course in Moldova and Ukraine. As IOTA-Global recently disbanded its corporate status, Tatham is currently Director of Defence Operations at SCL Group.

Verbalisation’s RAID

Another pair of 15 (UK) PSYOPS veterans and avowed fans of the new 77th Brigade, Sven Hughes and David Stanhope, are leaders at the behavioral marketing firm Verbalisation, which bills itself as “the world’s first consultancy dedicated to changing behaviour by precision-engineering language.” Hughes, a former head of elections at SCL from 2009–10 who also assisted NATO forces in Afghanistan, says his staff members are “largely ex-military personnel and political campaigners.” Stanhope spent eight years with 15 POG, serving under Cdr Tatham for a spell in Afghanistan, and also worked in 2011 for SCL (briefly joining fellow ex-IO/psyops agents Jerry Knight & the aforementioned Ian Tunnicliffe, both former SCL directors). The POG vets claim Verbalisation’s RAID aka Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostics® software tool can help military and marketing clients — including several News Corp media outlets — “decode” personalities based on 24 set parameters, including language, cognition, susceptibility, and culture.

Despite years of effort and billions of international dollars, the Iraq and Afghanistan information operations (IO) projects were deemed by experts to have been a failure. Cdr Tatham even co-wrote a UK Defence Academy report lamenting “the corporate failure to adapt IO and PSYOPS’s operating practices to the 21st century, instead relying upon ages-old methods of communication,” as well as an “over reliance of IO and PSYOPS on commercial advertising and marketing strategies.”

“Commercial marketing and advertising methods are designed to increase the hit rate of customers in a target group. A conversion of 10% would be considered outstanding and highly profitable. But in military operations achieving a 10% change in the behaviour of an insurgent group or a hostile community would be operationally insignificant,” Tatham wrote in the NATO StratCom Target Audience Analysis (TAA) course summary. He instead advocates for TAA and the use of scientific research into behavior predictors, such as language, likes, and motivation, as opposed to focusing the majority of resources on creative media production glitz.

To this end, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), a trading fund of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which is the equivalent of USA’s DARPA, conducted a study between May-Sept 2013 called ‘Project DUCO’ which contracted SCL and BDi to test out their TAA capabilities. The evaluation was undertaken as part of the Human and Social Influence project, funded from the MoD Science and Technology research budget. In-person questionnaires were verbally completed by young unmarried males (“YUMs”) in target regions, with SCL-trained interviewers canvassing neighborhoods like standard solicitors, simply because no other means existed to gain insight into individual personalities and groupthink.

It seems that the psyops startup incubators of Iraq and Afghanistan failed to overwhelmingly win the hearts and minds of the target audiences in those locales, but succeeded in honing the methodological requirements of the IO traffickers. As Tatham suggested, giant billboards and radio jingles aimed at a large population based on small sample size indicators weren’t effective enough, so a product like Verbalisation — listed under “Counter Terrorism and Security” on R-Cloud, Dstl’s marketplace for partnered contractors — was born, ready and able to pinpoint individuals & target groups for analysis and alteration.

Of course, all of this sounds exactly like the TAA work SCL was contracted in early 2017 to perform for the US State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, a reboot of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and its famously failed 2010s online propaganda & surveillance program.

SCL Group Joins the US State Dept.

Robert Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica’s foreign parent company signs deal to do propaganda work for State’s Global…

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SCL and State’s CSCC were not strangers prior to 2017, though, as Nigel Oakes had spoken at a January 2012 CSCC seminar on “The Most Common Mistakes in Designing Influence Campaigns,” at which Oakes was pitching the State Dept on knowledge acquired from Iraq and Afghan 15 POG work. The seminar’s BDi-provided video description explains, “Nigel highlighted four very common errors made in designing influence campaigns, especially if one is trying to induce significant behavior change.”

Bits and pieces of the 2000s Middle Eastern psyops extravaganza had trickled out back then, but the full extent of B-PC/BPPA’s Iraq work under Mark Turnbull was only revealed in a October 2016 report entitled “Fake News and False Flags” by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK nonprofit devoted to extended and unbiased investigations.

Five years previous, the Bureau conducted another well-publicized investigation into Turnbull’s BPPA, in which B-PC executives were caught on tape boasting about their unique “dark arts” ability to initiate political change via their deep infiltration into the highest levels of UK government. The execs also boasted of their skills in hiding bad PR by manipulating Google results with juiced-up ‘Google bombing’, and how they had a team devoted to Wikipedia reputation management, which is common now but was rather cutting-edge at the time.

NOT EXACTLY MAGGIE & GORBY

Also back in 2004 — the same year BPPA formed and their work began in Iraq — B-PC took on a contract to spin their web in Ukraine for Yulia Tymoshenko in the time of the Orange Revolution, which would have seen them working against Paul Manafort’s clients in the Party of Regions, as well as in the vicinity of fellow contractor SCL. A previous article published by TEXTIFIRE explored SCL’s role in those events and the related history, which involves billionaires, rigged elections, the most glamorous Russian spy in history, and a mythical war room SCL billed as “The Most Powerful Weapon In The World.”

SCL Group’s Eurasian Vacation

SCL once had their defense contractors’ conference booth made by a design team from Goldeneye 007. Here’s a pitch for…

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Bell’s involvement in Ukraine did not end in 2004, for even though they had been employed by future Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, it was her frequent antagonist and Party of Regions bigwig Dmytro Firtash who retained the long-term services of B-PC. Firtash is an oil & natural resources magnate who also owns Ukraine’s largest TV station, but is now an internationally wanted criminal suspect trailing a long history of personal relationships with Vladimir Putin and Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich. Just as with the American PR firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, whose client list is littered with objectively unsavory characters, Bell Pottinger has long made itself available to the highest bidder.

Bell advised the Firtash Foundation while Anthony Fisher, senior consultant with Bell Pottinger, served as director of the Foundation. Fisher also co-founded the Firtash front Scythian Limited, which came under fire for funneling foreign funds to Tory politicians in a scandal which prevented a National Security Adviser nominee from being confirmed, and is a board member of the Firtash-supported group British Ukrainian Society (BUS). Chairman of BUS is Lord Risby, an economics graduate of Cambridge University, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, and current member of the House of Lords.

Firtash’s direct ties to several well-placed UK Conservatives is a curiosity. Despite his heavy baggage, Firtash has stayed active in politics via his BUS, and he donated a truck full of cash to help establish Cambridge University’s Ukrainian Studies school. Perhaps his open checkbook and loose lips have allowed him to avoid extradition to the USA, instead roaming free in Vienna while out on US$125,000,000 bail from long-unprosecuted charges. Without speculating too much about his actual place in this tale, Firtash’s story in particular is reminiscent of the days of Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev era Cold War double agents.

What’s old is apparently new again, however, as the Parliamentary members of the short-lived group Conservative Friends of Russia would no doubt decline to attest. Conservative Friends rapidly fizzled after public outcry but quickly relaunched as the Westminster Russia Forum, yet those ex-Friends could be expected to assure us that their original so-called “Tories for Putin” group was strictly on the up and up.

As Friends co-founder Richard Royal explained at the time in his 2012 Guardian op-ed, the Tories had turned their backs on the more liberal Labour leadership but found their increasingly hardlining nativist gaze met in Eurasia. “We must remember, however, that being a Friend of Russia is not the same as being a Friend of the Russian government,” said Royal. “By that reckoning, our Conservative members were not friends of Britain between 1997 and 2010[.]”

Margaret Thatcher & Lord Tim Bell (Source)]

Retro ’80s stylings abound, in fact, as Conservative bedfellow Lord Bell was nominated for his knighthood by Margaret Thatcher, for whom he served as personal media adviser throughout her time as UK Prime Minister, with their close friendship illustrated by Bell’s official announcement of her 2013 death.

The Iron Lady left behind quite the well-connected coterie, with her Atlantic Bridge co-founder Liam Fox overseeing the aforementioned psyops work while Shadow Defence Secretary & Defence Secretary from 2005–2011, his megadonor patron Michael Hintze a client of Lord Bell’s during the time of Atlantic Bridge, and old friend Sir Geoffrey Pattie — another former vice-chair of the Conservative party who served as Thatcher’s Minister of State for Industry & Information Technology and Undersecretary for Defence Procurement — spending a few years as a Director of SCL.

Though Sir Pattie had switched from Director to President of SCL Group four years prior, SCL Elections’ official registration in the month preceding President Obama’s reelection — with Mercer Money in its coffers and Lord Bell’s ‘Special Projects’ ex-director Mark Turnbull at its helm — set off a chain reaction of SCL corporate maneuverings that extended across the following four years.

A flurry of declarations of new subsidiaries and subsequent name changes of those companies culminated on 7 September 2016, when SCL Director Alexander Nix transferred all 100 original shares of SCL Elections from himself to the company SCL Analytics. Formed a year prior, SCL Analytics is 70% owned by Nix and 30% owned by its parent company SCL Group.

As far as is known at presstime, SCL Group and Nix currently co-own all shares of SCL Analytics, which owns all shares of SCL Elections, which owns all shares of [what was originally named SCL USA Ltd but as of 13 April 2016 is officially known as] Cambridge Analytica (UK) Limited.

However, that CA-UK is technically separate from the American subsidiary Cambridge Analytica LLC, which was registered in Delaware on 31 Dec 2013, over two years sooner. To confuse us even further, 22 Apr 2014 saw the DE registration of SCL USA Inc., which is also wholly owned by SCL Elections but is separate from the 12 Feb 2003 establishment of SCL USA LLC.

If you followed all that, give yourself a pat on the back and a candy.

TEXTIFIRE peer edited this tremendous chart by Wendy Siegelman & Ann Marlowe]

SEEKING A Ph.D. IN EXPLOITATIVE AD-TECH

Cambridge Analytica LLC — the US company which will henceforth be referred to as CA or CambAnal — has garnered a large amount of public interest over the last year and a half for its use of big data in elections, just like Rebekah Mercer wanted. The primary subject of that media attention has been debate over the controversial merits of CA’s claimed use of Five Factor Model or BIG5 personality profiling — aka OCEAN, an acronym derived from Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — with much less of a focus on either the sourcing of the identifying datapoints or the origination of the tools & methodology CA deployed.

A December 2016 article in Das Magazin — a sensation in Germany at the time, which spread virally upon its English translation published by VICE’s Motherboard in January — told a story relayed by Michal Kosinski, formerly Director of Operations for Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit. Kosinski seemed to be suggesting SCL and CA might have stolen (or at least repurposed without permission) his team’s research into third-party use of millions of Facebook interactions as data point items, which Kosinski et al collected using a Facebook quiz app and then ran through OCEAN profiling for personality cataloguing purposes.

Cambridge University played a major role in an earlier TEXTFIRE article, as it has become a hotbed of international spy chatter over the last several months, encompassing rumors about Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian influence at the renowned spycraft coffee klatch, the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (where 15 POG’s Stephen Jolly is said to be a frequent attendee). Switching gears, however, it is important to note that Cambridge was partnering with another organization on this and other psychometrics projects: Microsoft Research.

But How Does It Work?!? (Source)]

At the time of his key March 2013 journal article, Kosinski was also a research advisor to the Online Services and Advertising group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. One of his two article co-authors was Dr. Thore Graepel, who “is a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge leading the Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group, where their work is focused on the application of large scale machine learning and probabilistic modelling techniques to a wide range of problems including online advertising, web search, and games,” according to his still-active Cambridge online profile.

Perhaps Cambridge simply needs to update its website, for Dr. Graepel currently works as Research Lead at Google DeepMind and Professor of Computer Science at University College London. DeepMind is a company Google purchased in 2014, which seeks to conquer quantum computing but now primarily develops “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms,” and which has come under fire for its mishandling of millions of UK patients’ health data while under contract from Britain’s NHS.

The other significant co-author on that publication (and its several predecessors, starting in Feb 2012) was Dr David Stillwell, Deputy Director of The Psychometrics Centre, whose Cambridge profile labels the barely-30y/o as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Psychometrics.” Stillwell originally wrote the myPersonality app which gathered the studies’ data from millions of Facebook profiles, doing so while preparing for his graduate studies in 2007. Just one year after Facebook first became available to the general public, myPersonality began hoarding user profiles.

Stillwell also created a Facebook app called You Are What You Like, a product released no later than October 2013. “By linking the myPersonality database to Facebook Likes we have created an application that is able to predict your personality simply by logging in to your Facebook account,” boasted its deactivated Cambridge webpage.

Another tool developed from myPersonality (and its cousin myIQ) was LikeAudience, described in the 2010–11 annual Cambridge report as “a breakthrough research and marketing tool developed by Michal Kosinski that provides detailed psycho-demographic profiles of brands, products, ideas, and all the other things people like on Facebook.”

The Psychometrics Centre was working on “gender difference in intelligence” and “perceptions of intelligence in Facebook images and their relationship to actual IQ and to personality, the validity of social network likes as predictors of product preference and the relationship between personality and product preference,” the report went on to say. “Michal Kosinski established a continuing collaboration with the Microsoft Laboratory at Cambridge, on several projects including an exploration of crowd sourcing of intelligence in the Amazon Mechanical Turk.”

“Never before have we had access to such comprehensive behavioural data about consumers,” said Kosinski in a 22 Apr 2011 article by Cambridge. “We think [LikeAudience] will revolutionise marketing, because it introduces a completely new dimension by adding scientifically robust personality tests to other demographic information.”

The same article announced Kosinski and Stillwell “believe that [LikeAudience] will be of particular value to marketers, who will be able to uncover new potential audiences for their advertising campaigns, and exploitable niches based on the fans of their closest rivals. The potential significance for politicians, particularly when on the election trail, is also clear.”

LikeAudience’s dashboard (Source)]

Identifying politics and elections as potential use case scenarios has been a common theme with these products. The “How Does It Work?” page on YouAreWhatYouLike.com posited, “If most of the things you like are liked by liberal people (e.g. Quentin Tarantino) — it is quite likely that you are also liberal.”

“Sarah Palin appeals to a rather different personality type. Her followers are likely to be more traditional in mindset, disciplined, dutiful, and older than the average Obama fan.” Further analysis of Palin-approving LikeAudience users found those with similar profiles “still track the fortunes of the last President, George W. Bush, and also enthuse about Pizza Hut and the Seattle Seahawks.”

PreferenceTool, the successor of the deprecated LikeAudience, seems quite sure of its efficacy in applying all this knowledge to behavioural modification. “PreferenceTool enables marketers to significantly improve targeting and reduce the cost of marketing campaigns,” said its splash page. “It is used by leading online marketing agencies and is proved to have increased campaign effectiveness by up to 140%. [emphasis theirs]”

Dr. Graepel explains Cambridge & Microsoft’s psychometric Facebook study; compare this to CA/SCL Elections’ explanation of their methodology HERE]

Despite an outward veneer of academically pure intention, this research is clearly being conducted for specific purposes. To get a better sense of their work, Cambridge has helpfully provided us with a litany of online demonstrations of what appears to be its currently most hyped [and administratively sanctioned] product, the online psychometric assessment creation tool Concerto. We can quickly see the difference between Cambridge Psychometric’s historical topics of focus, such as preschool activities and mental disorders, as compared to the names of quizzes performed in Concerto, including several titled “Advertisement Test”.

Both the Psychometrics Centre and Microsoft Research websites plainly hawk their myPersonality-derived services to interested clients, using keywords of ‘advertising’ and ‘machine learning’. Cambridge offers the use of myPersonality data as a service, on both the Psychometrics homepage and and its flagship Apply Magic Sauce site, and also offers open-source data to hundreds of active researchers at myPersonality.org.

Apply Magic Sauce hosts a sample personality quiz, which likely distracts rubberneckers more interested in the self-help quizzes found on Cambridge’s DiscoverMyProfile.com, but its business2business page boasts of services which will sound very familiar if you’ve read this far. “We enable instant psychological assessment of your users based on their online behaviour,” it excitedly exclaims, by using a range of tools “from multi-channel keyword targeting to psycholinguistic tailoring.”

Apply Magic Sauce pricing (Source)]

“In a fraction of a second, you can now adjust the presentation, delivery and content of your message to suit the distinct psychological make-up of the person viewing it,” if you are simply willing to pay a few hundred or thousand quid per month, depending on the extent of your customised needs. To be clear, Cambridge University’s publicly available Apply Magic Sauce product is openly offering to perform high-frequency advertisement creation based on psychographic profiling data culled from Facebook, in what is likely a very lucrative setup for the school.

On the private sector side, “Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group” sounds rather self-explanatory, so it is relatively clear what Microsoft has intended to accomplish through its Cambridge funding. Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC) research is being funneled into Microsoft’s Cortana AI tool and its Azure Cognitive Services AI platform, as well as “voting games” and internet ads. An MSRC study from Sept 2014 is titled “Efficient Advert Assignment”, focusing on algorithmic pay-per-click schemes in online search results.

“Only in the recent literature have computationally efficient methods been considered for market and auction design,” the paper reminds us. “In the context of electronic commerce and specifically sponsored search auctions, these computational considerations are of critical importance given the increased diversity and competition associated with online advertising.”

Cambridge and Microsoft’s team-up has produced algorithm-to-algorithm HFT of consumers’ personalities and their custom-targeted online adverts. No wonder the Psychometrics Centre changed departments in 2016, moving from Social and Developmental Psychology to Stephen Jolly’s Judge Business School.

MS Cognitive Services AI isn’t NEURTRAL, it’s RAYCYST (Source)]

TAKING THE CAMBRIDGE OUT OF CAMBANAL

With fingers pointing at CambAnal and CambUni as a result of all the recent media coverage, blame has begun to be shifted around. School, tech company, and professors are all turning on each other. In an attempt to uncover their true relationships, data protection advocate and researcher Paul-Olivier Dehaye has filed a number of Freedom Of Information requests with Cambridge, but has thus far only received refusals; instead, the University has appeared to be attempting to distance itself from the research in question. Their stance seems to be that they have no claim to the data or results, that Michal Kosinski owns it all, and that Microsoft is solely responsible for its existence.

In the aforementioned Das Magazin article, Kosinski absolved himself and Cambridge of any responsibility, saying, “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.” He instead laid nearly all the blame at the feet of a young Cambridge professor, then known as Dr Aleksandr Kogan. Kosinski said Kogan approached him in late January 2014, attempting to purchase access to myPersonality on behalf of a deep-pocketed company, and it was not until some time later that Kosinski remembered it was SCL. Kogan went on to start his own company and began harvesting Facebook information from unsuspecting Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, paying the going rate of pennies per full profile download, and then turned that info over to SCL in some sort of licensing deal.

In a public Facebook conversation, Kogan denies almost all of this. He says he and Kosinski knew each other and continued to stay in touch after SCL entered the frame; SCL also met and had direct interactions with Kosinski; and SCL was by that time heavily into machine learning and microtargeting applications of psychological data for political purposes.

As he noted in his lengthy Facebook rebuttal, Kogan legally changed his married name to Aleksandr Spectre in 2016, making him Dr Spectre. He only has a small handful of published papers to his name(s), focused exclusively on emotionality neuroscience, though that didn’t stop him from becoming Director aka “beloved commander” of the Cambridge Prosociality and Well-Being Lab as early as July 2013. His full birth name was Aleksandr Borisovich Kogan, owing to his Moldovan birth and Russian ancestry.

As easy as it would be to cast the Russian mad scientist Dr Spectre as the villain in this British spy story, the problem is Kosinski’s timeline doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The word on the street is CambAnal hired researchers from Cambridge University as part of its original staff, which is allegedly where the “Cambridge” came from when naming the company on its first 31 Dec 2013 Delaware registration, along with the perceived instant name cachet. But that this would be less than a month before Spectre allegedly approached Kosinski on behalf of SCL — or before SCL met Kosinski — is an enormous coincidence, especially since the Psychometric Centre’s Facebook-related research publications and marketing products had been making the rounds for 3–5 years at that point.

Not to mention, the first pre-CA “unpaid pilot project to show how SCL might work” for electioneering purposes was in the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race, which culminated on 5 Nov 2013. What was their ‘value add’ in mid/late 2013 if SCL was merely offering UK military psyops techniques (as described in our companion article), if Cambridge Analytica and its fancy-sounding name wouldn’t be officially established until two months later, and if they weren’t testing out any BIG5 methodology or offering up psycho-demographic profile data from Facebook?

Of course, it’s possible these shortcomings contributed to their candidate Ken Cuccinelli’s loss, despite another $600,000 of Mercer Money given to Cuccinelli supporters at Virginia Principles Fund, which is the only donation ever listed for that PAC. Perhaps they emerged from the losing battle with a better sense of their big data needs, but as the next few years unfolded, this model where Mercer donates to a campaign or PAC just prior to Cambridge Analytica’s employment would quickly become de rigueur.

Cuccinelli, who would later advise Ted Cruz, said he met Mercer on a fundraising trip to New York. “He’s very solid and understated. You wouldn’t know you were talking to someone with that kind of force,” said Cuccinelli. “He just thinks our country is off track and he’s in a position to do something to get it back on track.”

It’s unlikely CambAnal/SCL was the reason for the recent FBI raid of Strategic Campaign Group, a firm which also worked for Cuccinelli’s 2013 campaign and the Mercer-funded/CA-assisted John Bolton SuperPAC. Still, it’s unclear if SCL was legally allowed to do unpaid electioneering work in 2013, since SCL USA LLC’s 12 Feb 2003 Delaware establishment as a defense contractor made it the only American SCL subsidiary in existence at that time. And why is SCL USA LLC currently listed as a Foreign Company in VA records if it’s registered to Steve Bannon’s Beverly Hills business address…?

After recommending that the Mercers fund the startup SCL Elections in 2012, which was the major catalyst for the creation of CambAnal, Steve Bannon continued his push into UK affairs. He flew to England in late 2013 to meet with Raheem Kassam, a young far-right blogger and frequent thinktank employee. Bannon invited him to guide the hand of the upcoming Breitbart London bureau expansion site, which Kassam agreed to do.

Breitbart London successfully launched in February 2014 and began working surprising magic on the fortunes of UKIP, which would gain its biggest head of steam yet as it made huge gains in Parliamentary seats and pushed for an exit of Britain from the EU. This seems to be partially due to Kassam’s positioning as Bannon’s UK avatar. Kassam not only tirelessly supported the cause on Breitbart, but switched his voting allegiance from Conservative to UKIP at the time Bannon visited in 2013, and then suddenly rose to become UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s chief of staff in 2014.

Unfortunately for Farage’s bizarrely alleged good friend Robert Mercer, this was a few months before Renaissance Technologies would again be mentioned in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Farage: “Well Done Bannon; Well Done Breitbart” (Source)]

MR. MERCER GOES TO WASHINGTON

On 22 July 2014, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by US Senators Carl Levin (D) and John McCain (R), held a hearing titled, “Abuse of Structured Financial Products: Misusing Basket Options to Avoid Taxes and Leverage Limits.” Called in to testify were six financial heavyweights: the Managing Director of Barclays, the CEO of Barclays Capital, a Managing Director and the President of Deutsche Bank Securities, and two executives from Renaissance Technologies.

After a 6-year investigation, the firms were being accused of nearly 15 years of tax evasion through the use of “basket contracts” aka “basket options”, which are too complicated to necessitate a full explanation in this space. The end result is the conversion of short-term trading profits into long-term capital gains, which lowered the tax rate on their gains/profits from 35% to 15%, saving RenTec et al billions of dollars in taxes.

Using algorithms written to identify and exploit opportunities for statistical arbitrage — aka StatArb, which focuses on tiny and very brief pricing anomalies of publicly-traded assets, which occur for various reasons and are only visible to computers — Rentec would execute more than 100 thousand trades a day, and more than 30 million a year. Deutsche and Barclays then assisted RenTec and two hedge funds in covering up the digital paper trail, skirting the outermost edges of the tax law in the process.

This type of high frequency trading is among many different strategies that act as one, including the implementation of machine-learning technologies to make and implement investment decisions. In contrast to algorithms that make short-term market forecasts, incredibly powerful computer arrays use big data to look far into the future, continually buying and selling securities based on those predictions. To power this, RenTec developed its own programming language to run those modeling systems. Medallion Fund, its most profitable fund — perhaps the most profitable in the world, though it’s open only to RenTec employees — includes several million lines of code in its algorithmic instructions.

As RenTec founder Dr Jim Simons — the 2nd largest Democratic donor in 2016 and one of the first people Barack Obama visited in his first post-presidential trip to NYC — once said, “It’s 100% automated. It’s as automated as it can be. The computer does its thing. It generates its trade, and the trade gets executed. No one sticks its head to the door, and says: ‘Jeez! You should buy IBM!’ We couldn’t model that.”

Big winners in HFT need the best computers, the most bandwidth, and the closest proximity to stock exchanges in order to maximize their chances of finding exploits, but this is all much more useful when combined with constantly refreshed input on the state of the planet’s activities. RenTec is said to maintain one of the largest data troves in the world, compiling information on every bit or byte they can get their hands on. Just as with BlackRock, another financial firm with incredible success leveraging big data & information surveillance due to their decades-old data facility in Washington State and ten more elsewhere, the storage of eclectic trivia empowers their algorithms to make decisions based on all available data points & variables.

As Dr Peter Brown, Robert Mercer’s co-CEO and co-President testified in front of McCain, “We collect all the publicly available data we can find that we believe might bear on the movement of the prices of tradable instruments — news stories, analysts’ reports, energy reports, crop reports, weather reports, regulatory filings, accounting data, and, of course, quotes and trades from markets around the world. Our models use this data to make predictions about future price changes.”

Another huge source of the information constantly being compiled by enormous data warehouses like these comes from private distributors of pure social media output, known as the Firehose. Facebook and Twitter are the most important generators of this info flow, but nearly all social media companies make their raw data streams available for harvesting and analysis. A slew of companies have offered paid access to view the mountains of data via slick interfaces, as well as feed into hungry algorithms. All of these online interactions are near-instantly categorized, contextualized, and transformed into stock trades and/or ad purchases.

Mercer hoards his chips]

Despite all this money constantly changing hands, which is encoded in law as an important event for tax purposes, between 2010 — the midterm election cycle year when Republicans & Tea Partiers took control of the House of Representatives — and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. Just to reiterate, RenTec is thought to have kept over $6,000,000,000 in tax money away from the I.R.S. and federal government simply through the use of basket contract schemes, which was then paid out to RenTec employees and funneled back into the coffers of the ad & PR agencies who work for Citizens United v FEC-enabled SuperPACs.

Nothing much came of the McCain hearing, except suggestions by the I.R.S. in 2015 that basket contracts would come under scrutiny, before backing off of that threat a few months later. Hillary Clinton had proposed HFT taxes as part of her platform, which may help explain Mercer’s hatred of her, and the loopholes may get another look this year, possibly maybe, but not if Robert Mercer or his friends in the White House have anything to say about it.

Any rage over the embarrassment of RenTec’s perceived persecution in 2014—later more fully addressed through the funding of an opposing GOP candidate in McCain’s next Senate race — found an easy outlet that summer, as Cambridge Analytica LLC added psychographic profiles to the data warehouses and high-frequency personality trading algorithms finally became operational.

A landmark moment for CambAnal arrived a month before the RenTec hearing, as it was rewarded for all of its convoluted preparation when it received its first publicly recorded paycheck on June 10th, 2014: $20,000 for working on urine hoarder Art Robinson’s third attempt to unseat HFT critic Peter DeFazio in Oregon. The two PACs which donated enough to Robinson to cover that bill were America Inc ($21,000), run by conservative media activist L. Brent Bozell, and Ending Spending Action Fund ($732,712), which received $1.75m of Mercer Money during the 2014 election cycle.

It has recently been revealed that June was CA’s first claimed month with its heavyweight Vice President/Secretary, who is primarily known as the former stock trader, Pentagon employee, executive chairman of the most influential online news outlet of the past few years, and Tea Party & Brexit supporter extraordinaire who initially helped kickstart SCL as it rolled down its current path. All of this describes just one person: Mr Stephen K. Bannon.

CATCHING UP TO THE PRESENT TENSION

Steve Bannon — the current White House Chief Strategist who still attends National Security Council meetings, as of this article’s publication date — has owned at least a hefty chunk of Cambridge Analytica LLC, the Facebook-powered, international military psyops-based, Mercer-funded, Microsoft-enabled, finance-loopholed, Amazon-trained, far-right-affiliated, foreign-born, algorithmic-advertising-driven media machine which participated in both the victorious Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns.

In fact, Bannon is the only publicly documented shareholder/owner of Cambridge Analytica LLC to date. Every SCL subsidiary in the UK has reported their shareholders on a regular basis for public dissemination, as is the lawful standard, but similar information is generally not available in the US. As a result of Bannon’s required White House financial disclosures, however, we learned he owned between $1m-$5m in CambAnal, though in defiance of legality he had not sold it as of at least late April 2017.

Now, there is no shortage of marketing & PR agencies looking to exploit technology for political or financial gain, as evidenced by a private psychological operations firm-for-hire like Bell Pottinger, British Army psyops-based Verbalisation, or any number of boutique advertising startups. Even frequent GOP candidate vendor Campaign Solutions did so back in 2014 for the radically right wing John Bolton SuperPAC, which received $4m of Robert Mercer’s money between Apr 2014-Sep 2016.

Their job was to help microtarget DirectTV advertisements by cross-checking state voter files with consumer data such as magazine subscriptions, so the voters could then be sorted into 100 personality types, arranged into 28 clusters, and sent a specific version of a political ad tailored to each of those clusters through their satellite TV. This was a far cry from SCL’s in-person questionnaires of mere hundreds of YUMs for UK’s MoD, but Cambridge Analytica was also hired to work closely with Campaign Solutions on the 2014 campaigns to create those varying TV ads. In 2015 & 2016, CambAnal was repeatedly contracted by John Bolton SuperPAC to work with Connell Donatelli, which shares an owner with Campaign Solutions, to produce more targeted ads.

Even so, when Bannon’s CambAnal later joined Trump’s GOP data team in employing the same high-speed AI advertising and algorithmic purchasing strategies laid out by Microsoft, Cambridge University, Verbalisation, and even RenTec while partnering with Facebook & Google’s ad deployment platforms during the 2016 elections, it was a very big deal. Here we had highly motivated, massively funded, ideologically driven, career specialist military, psychology, and technology minds from both sides of the Atlantic working closely together to achieve specific outcomes at any cost.

For example, Liam Fox is the first-ever UK Secretary of State for International Trade, despite all of his outrageous behavior just a few short years ago. Apparently someone who profits off of private deals with international military contractors, all while taking a government paycheck to represent the public’s best interests, is exactly who should be in charge of Trade as Britain prepares to exit the European Union. Brexit’s success paved the way for Fox to triumphantly reclaim his lost power, which makes his role clear.

Brexit kingpin and former financial trader Nigel Farage was invited to speak at Heritage Foundation in 2015, along with Roger Helmer & other UKIP “Patriotic Voices from Europe”, delivering a barrage of Obama attacks to the delight of the crowd. In fact, Farage’s Leave campaigns were entirely unafraid of identifying their friends across the pond, as evidenced by the namecheck in Go Movement Ltd’s (GML) application for Leave designation: “GML will further coordinate with the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks that support an EU referendum, which will provide a strong ‘outside’ voice within the echo chamber.” Predictably, the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom is elated about Brexit.

Heritage Foundation was credited with formulating the exact blueprint for Trump’s first 100 days, which mostly worked perfectly (if we can agree its true intent was to deconstruct the administrative state). Even its slight failure might explain why President Jim DeMint was recently ousted, after which time Steve Bannon was floated as a replacement candidate. Things are now looking like they might go very bad in the Trump administration, but the suggestion that a White House Chief Strategist would leave that post for a thinktank should clarify the extent of Heritage’s power and influence. Rebekah Mercer’s placement as a strong Heritage board member, along with her donations of millions of Mercer Money, is likely stoking the coals under a Bannon-Heritage matchup.

Club for Growth, which has received at least $2,000,000 of Mercer Money since 2011, is welcoming the new administration with open arms. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Spring 2017 Club event on 19 March, in which he mentioned Tea Partiers Pat Toomey & Mike Lee by name and regaled the crowd with stories of the Club’s strong support for Pence since way back in 2000.

Atlantic Bridge’s former partner ALEC has also filled the halls of the US government and especially the White House, with supporters, donation recipients, and members running the show at the highest possible level. Those names include CIA chief Mike Pompeo, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, United Nations representative Nikki Haley, and — wait for it — VP Mike Pence.

Renaissance Technologies is a legend in the trading industry, partially because they have consistently been pioneers of automated financial prediction. In 2017, human quants across the market spectrum are being increasingly laid off and replaced by AI & algorithms. Machine learning is so prevalent in finance, with so much more predictive power than humans, that HFT and algos are the new normal. However, Robert Mercer is poised to dominate the industry with RenTec’s new HFT-killing patent, which will essentially elbow out all but the largest black box houses, leaving him King of FinTech.

These are the people that profited from techniques and software honed by the world’s largest militaries and tech corporations, merging media production intended to craft weapons out of art with… well, actually that perfectly describes both psyops and advertising, but merging those with total information awareness and special access to the control panels of the ubiquitous technologies used by billions of people. Theirs is the money that flowed freely in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, and that money has steered the conversations that buoyed their ascendancy.

At least two more enormous components to their success were glossed over in these pages, and we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the entire situation’s legality.

Amazingly, there is still so much more story to tell.

Stay tuned to TEXTIFIRE to catch up on the events of the last three years!

Thank you for reading and thanks to all the sourced researchers & artists.

NOTE: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that an Aleksandr Kogan who was the chief of a physiology school in Russia and has a neurocybernetics lab named after him is not the former Dr Spectre’s grandfather, according to Dr Kogan. We deeply regret the error.

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https://observer.com/2018/10/robert-mercer-bankrolled-pac-ali-alexander/

Billionaire Robert Mercer gave money to a PAC advised by a self-proclaimed “interpreter of energy.”

The spiritualist in question is Ali Alexander, formerly known as Ali Akbar, a GOP political operative with a notorious reputation that allegedly includes fraud.

“On the eve of the 2016 election, Robert Mercer donated $60,000 to a PAC Alexander advises,” reported Politico on Monday. “Alexander, who identifies himself as black and Arab, brings a more new-age approach to the culture wars, calling himself an ‘interpreter of energy for this period.’”

Alexander is one of the many New Right media celebrities orbiting Trumpland who built a brand through livestreaming musings on political warfare. Like many New Right figures, he also has a history of dog whistling to the nationalist wing of the MAGA movement.

After the first “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Alexander interviewed the white nationalist Matt Colligan alongside former Gateway Pundit reporter Lucian Wintrich. Colligan was identified as a tiki-torch holding participant at the gathering of white nationalists which resulted in the murder of protester Heather Heyer.

“Nazi flags, ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’ memes, and attacks on mainstream media were displayed by Colligan during the livestream,” noted Right Wing Watch in its coverage of the since-deleted Periscope. “Akbar insisted that the conversation was ‘not a debate’ and that ‘there’s no winner, there’s no loser’ in the duo’s friendly discussion with Colligan.”

Alexander also claimed that white men have been caricatured as evil by “white fat bitches” in the media, a sentiment which resonated with Wintrich and Colligan.

Wintrich was fired from the Gateway Pundit this August after appearing on a podcast hosted by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Alexander also appeared on Fuentes’ program over the summer to discuss the far-right identitarianism movement, where he speculated that “a number of Jewish people do hate crimes against their own communities to get press.”

This year, Alexander has made it a habit to note members of the media who are Jewish.

“Jake Tapper, who is a Jewish left-leaning journalist who works at CNN, was obsessed with packages that could not detonate and the tragic Synagogue shooting but dismissed the FL GOP shooting today. Called it simple ‘vandalism,'” tweeted the operative on Monday, referring to an incident earlier in the day in which the windows of Volusia County’s GOP headquarters were shot with bullets.

Alexander isn’t the only fringe figure Mercer has bankrolled. After Milo Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart, the Republican megadonor bankrolled his independent media venture (Milo Inc.) before a Buzzfeed report exposed the provocateur’s ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Mercer resigned from his hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, after the story’s publication.

Over the summer, PayPal suspended Yiannopoulos’ account over trolling a Jewish journalist with Nazi rhetoric through the company’s platform.

Alexander could not be reached for comment.

Filed Under: Politics, National Politics, Heather Heyer, Robert Mercer, Unite The Right, Lucian Wintrich, New Right, Ali Akbar, Matt Colligan

SEE ALSO: What the Koch Network’s Relaunch Tells Us About Their Battle Against Trumpism

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an 619 alex henderson

Trump has reportedly lost the backing of one of his most generous 2016 donors: the wealthy Mercer family. Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman is reporting that according to multiple sources, the Mercers won’t be supporting Trump in his 2020 reelection bid.

The Mercers supported Trump aggressively in 2016, donating at least $15.5 million to pro-Trump organizations and $10 million to the far-right and overtly pro-Trump Breitbart News. Billionaire Robert Mercer used the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which he co-founded in 2013, to promote Trump’s campaign — and after Trump won the general election, Rebekah Mercer (Robert Mercer’s daughter) became a senior member his transition team. The Mercers donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

But according to Sherman’s sources, the Mercers have become disillusioned with Trump for a variety of reasons. One of them has to do with former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon, who the Mercers brought to Trump’s campaign in 2016; after Bannon left the Trump Administration in 2017 and was “exiled” by Trump, Sherman explains, that “drove a wedge between Trump and the Mercers.”

The Mercers, according to Sherman, were also upset when Bannon was quoted extensively in Michael Wolff’s anti-Trump book “Fire and Fury” and made some comments that were critical of members of the Trump family. An anonymous source close to the Mercer family told Sherman, “Bob and Rebekah both felt so burned by Bannon and the negative publicity.”

In 2017, according to one of Sherman’s sources, Robert Mercer was pushed out as co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies — which the source said was “really spooked” by the FBI’s investigation of Cambridge Analytica.

A former Renaissance Technologies executive told Sherman that in 2016, Trump wasn’t the Mercers’ first choice for a GOP candidate — they preferred Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas but decided to back Trump after he received his party’s nomination and felt he would be preferable to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “They never really liked Trump,” the source told Sherman. “Trump was just Bob’s play against Hillary."

Another factor in the Mercers’ decision not to support Trump in 2020, according to Sherman’s sources, is Robert Mercer’s reclusive nature. Robert Mercer, allegedly, likes cats more than he likes people, and he believed he sacrificed his privacy because of his support of Trump.

A source close to the Mercers told Sherman, “Bob views all his political spending as a bad investment. This whole thing did not end up well for them.”

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omfg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

some lnx below

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

May 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey,James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Image

President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

Image

The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

Image

William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

ImageThe Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/interests-pushing-for-hard-line-against-iran

Tensions between the United States and Iran have skyrocketed in recent weeks following American military movements in the Persian Gulf and resumed uranium production by Iran. Decades of animosity worsened by the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal have sparked a major standoff, as both nations review strategy while denying any desire for war. Experts fear that an error on either side could spark a regional maelstrom that would dwarf the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in scope and lethality.

But while many members of Congress are seeking a way to prevent the potential conflict, others are pressuring the administration to maintain its aggressive stance. In a recent interview with PBS, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said the U.S. could end a potential war with Iran in two strikes, “the first strike and the last strike.” While he said he doesn’t want to go to war, he insisted that the U.S. would retaliate massively if provoked. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) demanded Monday that the U.S. “respond militarily and in an overwhelming fashion” if Iranian forces or proxies harm the United States or its allies in the region.

There may be more than genuine concern behind such aggressive stances towards Iran. Dozens of government officials, from Congress to the White House, have received financial support from an expansive network of interest groups, political action committees, foreign lobbyists and wealthy donors pushing for the hardest line possible against Iran.

At the heart of the rising hostility is National Security Advisor John Bolton, known throughout the political world for his hawkish foreign policy views and support for intervention in North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba and Iran. Rising to prominence during George W. Bush’s administration as the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control, Bolton has been a central figure in provoking the conflict between the U.S. and Iran. He recently sparked fears of war by suggesting that Iranian leaders wouldn’t “have many anniversaries left to enjoy” in a video posted by the White House and personally ordered updates to military plans that would send over 120,000 troops to the Middle East.

Bolton’s PAC and super PAC serve as the central financial mechanism of the wide-ranging influence network. Founded by Bolton in 2013, these groups quickly began to attract prominent megadonors who shared his aggressive view of foreign policy and his apprehension towards Iran. Over a five-year period up until when Bolton took office in 2018, the groups raked in more than $24 million in contributions, the vast majority of which came from a handful of large backers aligned against the Obama administration’s efforts to seek a diplomatic solution with Iran.

Chief among Bolton’s backers is Robert Mercer, the reclusive billionaire who was Donald Trump’s top donor in the 2016 presidential election. Over the course of the 2014, 2016, and 2018 election cycles, Mercer donated $5 million to The John Bolton Super PAC, a quarter of the super PAC’s lifetime receipts and one-sixth of Bolton’s combined contributions from both groups. OpenSecrets previously reported that Mercer was a primary funder of a secretive nonprofit that targeted swing voters with three disturbing anti-Muslim videos during the 2016 election.

Another prominent supporter is Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot and ardent critic of nuclear diplomacy with Iran. Marcus donated $530,000 to Bolton’s super PAC over its lifetime. Marcus has publicly scoffed at the prospect of conducting diplomacy with Iran, saying in a 2015 interview with Fox Business, “When you do business with the devil, you’re in deep trouble, and I think Iran is the devil.”

He also notably donated $3.5 million to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington think tank that has decried the Iran nuclear deal and submitted a memo to the Trump White House in 2017 outlining ways to stoke domestic unrest in Iran with the ultimate goal of regime change. The FDD’s suspected close ties with the Trump administration were further confirmed when Bolton selected a senior adviser at the organization to be his assistant in January 2019.

Bolton’s connections to hardliners don’t end with the committees. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the top individual political contributors for the 2018 midterms and major Trump donors, personally lobbied the president to select Bolton as deputy secretary of state. While this effort ultimately failed, Bolton eventually joined the administration as national security advisor- that move came after Sheldon Adelson supported publicity campaigns against Trump’s first national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, that claimed McMaster was anti-Israeli in an effort to open the position for Bolton. Adelson is also a prominent supporter of major anti-Iranian lobbying groups, having donated more than $1.04 million to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee since 2007 and $1.5 million to the FDD between 2008 and 2011.

Bolton and Adelson share strikingly similar beliefs: in 2013, Adelson publicly suggested that the U.S. drop an atomic bomb in the Iranian desert as a warning to the government to abandon its nuclear programs. In 2015, Bolton followed suit, writing an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”, in which he advocated for a pre-emptive strike on Iranian military facilities to stymie potential nuclear weapons development.

Also among Bolton’s financial backers is the Mojahedin-e Khalq (M.E.K.), an Iranian opposition group with a history of violence towards Iranians and Americans alike. Founded in 1965 by left-leaning Iranian students in opposition to the Shah, the group committed dozens of terrorist acts throughout the 1970s that killed thousands of Iranians and numerous American citizens.

Supporting Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the group quickly came to blows with the new government, conducting the 1981 bombing that killed Iranian president Mohammad Ali Rajai and prime minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar as well as six other senior officials. They fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the 1980 Iran-Iraq War and formed a close alliancewith the dictator over the next two decades, killing thousand of Iranian soldiers in combat and launching brutal campaigns of repression against the Kurdish people of northern Iraq.

The group was long-labeled a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government, with numerous Congressional transcripts showing the group was responsible for decades of terrorism. The group, whose philosophy is heavily influenced by Marxism and Islamism, has been described by many researchers as a cult, with women being forbidden to marry and all followers pledging near-fanatical support to the group’s leader, “Iran’s future president” Maryam Rajavi. The group’s goal has remained constant since its inception: overthrow the Iranian government.The M.E.K has dramatically expanded its presence in American policy spheres, attracting prominent political fans and spending millions on lucrative speaker fees to gain allies in Washington. The M.E.K.’s political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), led a multimillion-dollar influence campaign beginning in the latter half of the 2000s that lobbied dozens of congressmen to push the State Department to remove the group from its designated terrorist organizations list. Three of Washington’s top lobbying groups — DiGenova & Toensing, Akin Gump and DLA Piper — were paid over $1.5 million dollars in 2012 to lobby for the delisting and protection of the group’s members in Iraq. The effort was ultimately successful, as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton removed the M.E.K from the list in 2012.

Their lucrative speaking deals have attracted some of the biggest names in American politics, among them former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, former FBI director Louis Freeh, and former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph.

The M.E.K’s influence extends to many members of the current government. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao was paid $50,000 to give a five-minute speech to a meeting of the NCRI in 2015. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke at the group’s 2016 gala in Paris, commending the group’s dedication and promising to tell the Trump campaign about their demands for regime change in Iran.

But Bolton has always been the star of the show. Records show that the M.E.K has paid Bolton at least $180,000 in speaker fees to attend the group’s annual Paris conference for more than a decade. At the 2017 annual summit, Bolton declared that the president’s review of Iranian policy should conclude that the Ayatollah’s government shouldn’t survive into its fortieth year, promising the crowd in attendance that they would meet again in 2019 to celebrate their victory in Tehran.

The M.E.K is finding themselves welcomed by many on Capitol Hill who have been funded by Bolton’s political action committees and allies. Cotton, described by some as the loudest voice advocating for escalated conflict alongside Bolton, also received thousands of dollars in contributions from Sheldon Adelson and $5,000 from John Bolton PAC in 2014 and spoke at a 2015 event run by the Organization of Iranian American Communities, which is closely aligned with the M.E.K.

Cotton was joined there by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who, in addition to being backed by $1.37 million in independent expenditures from Bolton’s super PAC, journeyed to Albania in 2017 to meet with Rajavi and express admiration for the former terrorist group’s “struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran.” Joining him in Albania was Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), current chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and another Bolton beneficiary.

Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees.

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.

For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: info@crp.org

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/18/climate-advocates-underestimate-power-fossil-fuel-misinformation-campaign-brulle

Climate Advocates Underestimate Power of Fossil Fueled Misinformation Campaigns, Say Top Researchers

By Graham Readfearn • Friday, January 18, 2019 - 08:51

Myron Ebell at a Heartland Institute conference

Climate action advocates have underestimated the strength and sophistication of decades-long fossil fuel-funded misinformation campaigns and need a coordinated set of strategies to fight back, say leading academics.

Among those strategies, say the three researchers from Yale and Brown University, are promoting financial transparency, suing misinformers and their funders, and researching the vast networks of think tanks and front groups.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Yale University's Professor Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell, together with Brown University’s Professor Robert Brulle, say people working on responses to climate change “cannot afford to underestimate the economic influence, institutional complexity, strategic sophistication, financial motivation, and societal impact of the networks” behind climate misinformation campaigns.

Brulle, who is also an academic at Drexel University, told DeSmog that after conversations with leaders of environment groups and foundations, he had concluded “there is virtually no understanding of the nature or extent of misinformation efforts and organized efforts to stop climate action.”

Misinformation Ignored

He said: “So in my opinion, the efforts to promote climate action are failing to take into account opposition efforts in their strategies. I can assure you that this is not the situation for the organized efforts to stop climate action — which I call the climate countermovement.”

Brulle and Farrell have each produced several major studies in leading academic journals on the funding and influence of the “climate countermovement” and its fossil fuel interests. In 2018, Brulle joined several academics in criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for ignoring in a major report swaths of research and evidence on the impact of organized climate science denial.

In this most recent commentary, they lay out the pervasive nature of misinformation campaigns on climate change in the United States and how those campaigns captured Republicans.

Singled out in the paper are groups including the Heartland Institute, companies including oil giant Exxon, individuals like former Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team members Steve Milloy and Myron Ebell, and the vast network of groups funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and the petrochemical businesses controlled by Charles Koch and brother David Koch.

...wonkette

Not mentioned by the AP: One of the biggest fans of the notion that a little radiation is good for you is billionaire nutjob Robert Mercer, who helped buy Donald Trump an election and whose daughter remains the biggest financial backer of Dead Breitbart's Home For White Resentment, yes, even after Mercer's divorce from Steve Bannon last year.

Mercer finds the whole idea simply enchanting, and apparently picked it up from Arthur Robinson, the crazy rightwing Oregon doctor and sheep rancher who wants to collect everyone's urine and find the secret of NIMH, or at least immortality. In addition to filling his ranch with Mercer-donated freezers (which in turn are filled not with Indianas Jones, but with 14,000 pee samples), Robinson fills the minds of dumb billionaires with fake science, as this lovely Jane Mayer profile of Mercer discussed in 2017. Mercer, you see, likes to

downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, "was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren't such a big deal." [...]

Robinson appears to be the source of Robert Mercer's sanguine view of nuclear radiation: in 1986, Robinson co-authored a book suggesting that the vast majority of Americans would survive "an all-out atomic attack on the United States." Robinson's institute dismisses climate change as a "false religion."

Well OF COURSE it does. We know of no evidence Mercer or Robinson directly influenced the new EPA thinking, but obviously those kooks are part of the anti-science deregulatory machine surrounding Trumpworld. Part of the background radiation, if you will.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/08/zinke-blamed-environmental-terrorists-for-wildfires-heres-the-crazy-backstory-that-led-to-that/

grist

From California to British Columbia, the West is burning up. While fire experts are clear that climate change is a major factor in making wildfires more frequent and more intense, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke can’t seem to make up his mind about its role. Instead, he has blamed an unusual boogeyman for the fires: environmental terrorists.

“We have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access—that refuse to allow [the] harvest of timber,” he told Breitbart earlier this month. The underlying cause of catastrophic blazes, he said, is the “fuel load” of dead and dying timber in our forests. Whoa there, Zinke!

Fire experts do say that there’s more fuel in Western forests than there used to be, thanks to decades of aggressive fire suppression—and, well, because the warmer weather has been drying everything up.

Understanding Zinke’s bizarre claim about environmental terrorists requires a short history lesson. The concept came from one of the environmental movement’s biggest foes: libertarian activist Ron Arnold, who once told theNew York Times that he wanted to “destroy environmentalists.”

Arnold coined the term “ecoterrorism” in 1983 article and later published the book Eco-terror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, which attempted to link the environmental movement with the Unabomber. Arnold used “ecoterrorism” to refer to groups like Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and Earth First! that sometimes engaged in property crimes, like vandalism and tree spiking, to combat environmental degradation and animal rights abuses.

Experts who have studied the phenomenon say “ecoterrorism” is not an appropriate term.

“In my research, I found that 90 to 95 percent of all direct actions, or crimes if you will, perpetrated by these groups do not fall anywhere close to the term ‘terrorism,'” says Donald Liddick, author of Eco-Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements.

A 2013 study that surveyed the acceptance of “ecoterrorism” found that “there is no documented evidence of harm coming to humans as a result of actions by radical environmentalists.” The authors suggest that terms like “obstruction,” “vandalism,” and “sabotage” more accurately described actions labeled as “ecoterrorism.”

Tree spiking, the widely feared practice of boobytrapping trees with metal rods, resulted in only one serious injury. Tree-spiking groups gave ample warning of their actions—they didn’t want the trees to be cut down, after all.

Liddick points out that Arnold had political motivations when he coined the phrase. Arnold is a policy advisor to the climate-denying think tank The Heartland Institute and the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from ExxonMobil and the ultra-conservative Mercer Family Foundation.

The term “ecoterrorism” picked up steam through the ’80s and ’90s, and began to appear in the prosecution of environmental and animal activists. Things took a turn for the weird in 2004: The FBI’s top official in charge of domestic terrorism, John Lewis, named ecoterrorism and the animal rights movement “the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat,” over far-right extremism, the KKK, and anti-abortion groups. (Arnold, it turns out, had asked the FBI to take a closer look at “ecoterrorists” in 2002.) At the time of the FBI’s declaration, no one had been killed in any attacks by these groups, according to CNN.

While accusations of “ecoterrorism” have fallen in recent years, the label has been used against activists at Standing Rock, the valve turners, and other pipeline opponents. Zinke’s use of the term didn’t surprise Seymour.“To call something terrorism when it doesn’t actually entail a loss of human life is problematic, to say the least,” says Nicole Seymour, assistant professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.

“It’s kind of those boogeymen that the Trump administration and similar folks have been trying to implant in our imagination—these concepts made up to create public panic,” Seymour says.

Seymour sees Zinke’s use of “environmental terrorism” as a sound bite that casts blame off of climate change and onto environmentalists.

Liddick has a different perspective. “Knowing politics as I know politics, I think it’s about lumbering the Sierra,” he says. “Some of the corporate interests want to get the Sierra Nevada softwood and hardwood.”

On Thursday, the day after I spoke with Liddick, the Trump administration announced plans to fight wildfires with more logging and controlled burns on federal land. The timber industry has long used fire prevention as an excuse to clear forests.

So Zinke’s comments didn’t come out of nowhere. But how is all this connected to ecoterrorists? It all goes back to our old libertarian pal Ron Arnold. In addition to coining “ecoterrorism,” he was also the leading force behind the “Wise Use” movement—an anti-environmentalist approach to managing federal lands that emphasizes extraction. Its agenda, spelled out by Arnold in 1988, includes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening all public lands to mining and oil exploration, and clear-cutting old growth in national forests — partly for wildfire prevention, of course. In other words, this tenuous link between ecoterrorism and logging is 20 years old.

---

camb anal belly up 5/18

see russians, wiki, voter suppression ?!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/04/05/the-amount-robert-mercer-spent-on-politics-in-2016-likely-topped-30-million/?utm_term=.f4c3204333f4

no lnx, grafix

We may never know how much money billionaire Robert Mercer put into political activity during the 2016 election cycle. For one thing, the definition of political spending is surprisingly nebulous. Does his co-ownership of Breitbart News during the 2016 campaign count? For another, some portion of Mercer’s spending probably went to “dark money” organizations, nonprofit groups that aren’t required to publish their donor lists but can spend money on political activity.

On Thursday, the Center for Responsive Politics reported on one example of Mercer contributing to just such an organization. The group Secure America Now produced videos warning ominously about Muslim takeovers of France, Germany and the United States. The video below was published three days before the election.

The group received a bit over $5 million and worked with Facebook and Google ad sales teams to optimize the reach of the ads. They’re a good example of the gray area that such nonprofit organizations occupy: Although not explicitly calling for the election of Donald Trump, they don’t leave much doubt about their intent.

How did the Center for Responsive Politics learn that Mercer gave to the group if the group doesn’t have to report its donors? It called and asked, and was given a list of donors. Mercer gave $2 million.

So let’s figure out how much Mercer spent on politics in 2016.

We know that Mercer spent more than $49 million in 2016 (and the 2016 election cycle).

We know, too, that he has made investments in businesses he was involved in, although not necessarily in 2016. More on that in a bit.

That $49.8 million was split in two pieces. About $25 million was spent directly on politics, including that $2 million in dark money. An additional $25 million was donated to the Mercer Family Foundation.

Let’s break down the political spending (which includes contributions in the 2016 cycle — meaning also in 2015).

The biggest chunk, $15.5 million, was spent on a pro-Trump PAC called Make America Number 1. That’s not what it was always called; during the Republican primary, it was called Keep the Promise, one of several PACs dedicated to electing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) president. The Mercers, you may recall, switched to Trump in the middle of 2016. The campaign then started using Cambridge Analytica, Mercer’s data firm, to supplement its voter outreach and hired Kellyanne Conway from Keep the Promise.

The next largest investment was to a PAC associated with John Bolton, recently named President Trump’s third national security adviser. (Bolton’s PAC spent some of that money on Cambridge Analytica as well.) The $2 million spent on Secure America Now was the third largest expense from a PAC or campaign.

Campaigns, in light blue at the top of the chart, could accept only a few thousand dollars. This is one reason billionaires like Mercer give to PACs that do outside advocacy: There are no limits to how much they can spend.

We’ve named the other businesses to which Mercer may have contributed: Breitbart News, Cambridge Analytica and a film-production company called Glittering Steel. We don’t know how much he may have spent with each company. Each, though, was engaged in 2016 politics. (Glittering Steel was paid by the pro-Trump PAC to presumably make ads, although some have questioned that arrangement.)

Other political committees that received at least $100,000 from Mercer:

Kelli PAC (affiliated with Kelli Ward), $700,000

Warrior PAC (supporting Rob Maness), $600,000

Fighting for Ohio Fund (supporting Sen. Rob Portman), $500,000

Black Americans for a Better Future, $425,000

Republican National Committee, $300,600

Believe Again (supporting Bobby Jindal), $250,000

Club for Growth Action, $250,000

State Conservative Reform Action PAC, $250,000

Team Ryan (House Speaker Paul D. Ryan), $244,200

Campaign for American Principles, $136,000

National Republican Senatorial Committee, $133,600

Silver State PAC Inc., $100,000

Now let’s break out that $25 million Mercer gave to the Mercer Family Foundation. The nonprofit foundation files an annual report called a 990 articulating where its money was spent. In 2016, it spent about $19 million — meaning that Mercer’s contribution alone covered the foundation’s outlays.

We can look at the foundation’s spending in four groups:

Donations to conservative think tanks (in green below)

Donations to organizations that bolster conservative political causes (in light blue)

Donations to organizations focused on questioning climate science (the lightest shade of green)

Donations to educational or arts groups (middle shade of green)

About $6 million of the Mercer contribution wasn’t spent. The biggest beneficiary of the money that was spent is Donors Trust, an umbrella organization for conservative nonprofit organizations.

The next biggest recipient is the Media Research Center, which works to undercut mainstream media reporting and boost conservative media. (Among other things, it operates the anti-mainstream media site NewsBusters.) Media Research Center is one of those edge cases: It polices what it considers liberal bias in the media, with the net effect of aiming to boost conservatives in politics.

The foundation also gave $2 million to the Government Accountability Institute, which aims to expose corruption in government. A bit lower on the list is Reclaim New York, a nonprofit organization that promotes engagement in local politics.

Other foundation donations went to overtly or implicitly political groups:

$500,000 to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland

$500,000 to a group doing voter registration at NASCAR races

$250,000 to the American Conservative Union, which runs the Conservative Political Action Conference

$250,000 to the anti-union Center for Union Facts

In total, we estimate that $5.2 million went to such groups from the foundation.

In total, including money paid by the foundation, Mercer probably spent about $30 million directly on political campaigns, and gave to political PACs and nonprofit groups and through his foundation. (The foundation is directed by his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who works closely with Mercer on political issues.)

That number could grow, depending on whether other dark-money groups inadvertently reveal their donors to curious reporters.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/27/yiannopoulos-business-implodes-after-death-of-crypto-billionaire-557456

Running out of money and down on his luck, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos laid off the small staff of Milo Entertainment Inc. earlier this month, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Yiannopoulos’ company has fallen on hard times ever since his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, severed their financial backing last year.

According to the sources, Yiannopoulos had been expecting to instead receive significant financial backing from the banking heir and cryptocurrency billionaire Matthew Mellon. But those hopes were dashed with Mellon’s unexpected death from an apparent drug overdose on April 16.

On Monday, Yiannopoulos posted a photo on Instagram of himself with Mellon. “I spent a few days and nights in Miami and LA with the incredible human being Matthew Mellon, the last of them just a day before he passed,” Yiannopoulos wrote in the caption. “He was brilliant, infectious and warm-hearted and I will never forget getting to know this remarkable person. Rest in peace now, MM. You left a giant stamp on the world.”

With Mellon’s unexpected death, Yiannopoulos could no longer afford the staff of Milo Entertainment.

“He fired everybody,” said one person familiar with Yiannopoulos’ operation, which had employed a handful of full-time and part-time staffers.

Among them was the journalist Chadwick Moore, who was technically terminated several days before learning of his firing, according to two people familiar with the situation....

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Robert+Mercer&order=desc&sort=A

Category Contributor Occupation Date Amount Recipient

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 04-10-2015 $11,000,000.00 Make America Number 1

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L MR

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES LLC 09-08-2014 $2,500,000.00 Freedom Partners Action Fund

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-14-2016 $2,000,000.00 Make America Number 1

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 03-17-2016 $2,000,000.00 Make America Number 1

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 09-25-2014 $1,000,000.00 Ending Spending Action Fund

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-23-2012 $1,000,000.00 American Crossroads

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 10-25-2012 $1,000,000.00 American Crossroads

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP./FINA 07-28-2011 $1,000,000.00 Restore Our Future

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 10-16-2014 $750,000.00 Ending Spending Action Fund

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 06-30-2014 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLGIES 08-28-2014 $500,000.00 Women Speak Out PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENASSIANCE TECHNOLOGIES LLC 01-29-2016 $500,000.00 New York Wins

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-05-2016 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 02-26-2016 $500,000.00 Make America Number 1

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

NEW YORK, NY 10022 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 05-16-2016 $500,000.00 Fighting For Ohio Fund

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 03-20-2014 $500,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 10-23-2017 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 12-28-2017 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 12-18-2015 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 02-24-2015 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 04-01-2012 $500,000.00 Prosperity First

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 09-28-2015 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 09-06-2016 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT AND DIANA

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 08-05-2016 $500,000.00 KelliPAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 04-28-2014 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY MR

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 06-30-2015 $500,000.00 John Bolton Super PAC

FEDERAL LAW PROHIBITS THE USE OF CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF SOLICITING CONTRIBUTIONS OR FOR ANY COMMERCIAL PURPOSE.

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

SETAUKET, NY 11733 FINANCIAL CONSULTANT 07-27-2017 $450,000.00 Remember Mississippi

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 08-02-2014 $300,000.00 Citizens for Ethics In Government

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 06-09-2014 $300,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETUCKET, NY 11753 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 08-24-2016 $300,000.00 Warrior PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT AND DIANA

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-27-2017 $300,000.00 KelliPAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 10-24-2014 $250,000.00 New York 2014

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 09-08-2014 $250,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 03-14-2012 $250,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT LEROY

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 08-01-2012 $250,000.00 Prosperity First

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT MR

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 10-01-2012 $250,000.00 Freedom PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 06-29-2015 $250,000.00 Believe Again

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 06-16-2014 $250,000.00 Senate Conservatives Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-25-2016 $250,000.00 State Conservative Reform Action PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 07-25-2012 $250,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 07-31-2015 $250,000.00 Club for Growth Action

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES CORP. 08-15-2012 $239,354.00 Republican Super PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

STONY BROOK, NY 11790 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 10-25-2010 $202,500.00 Concerned Taxpayers of America

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT AND DIANA

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 07-22-2016 $200,000.00 KelliPAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENASSIANCE TECHNOLOGIES LLC 09-29-2015 $200,000.00 Fighting For Florida Fund

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

ST. JAMES, NY 11780 RENNAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 04-22-2014 $200,000.00 US Jobs Council

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES LLC 04-16-2014 $200,000.00 American Heartland PAC

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT

EAST SETAUKET, NY 11733 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES LLC 07-23-2012 $200,000.00 National Horizon

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

NEW YORK, NY 10022 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 09-18-2015 $200,000.00 Black Americans For A Better Future

Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group MERCER, ROBERT L

NEW YORK, NY 10022 RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGIES 11-15-2015 $200,000.00 Black Americans For A Better Future

---

https://thinkprogress.org/mercers-climate-denial-influenced-trump-fa45a181fff2/

no lnx

Here’s how the Mercer family’s climate denial funding influenced Trump

Nearly a quarter of the Mercers' 2016 donations went to groups which deny the science on climate change.

KYLA MANDEL

JAN 26, 2018, 3:10 PM

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Robert and Rebekah Mercer attend the 12th International Conference on Climate Change hosted by The Heartland Institute on March 23, 2017 in Washington, D.C.

Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, powerful conservative donors with close ties to the Trump administration, donated millions of dollars to climate science denial groups, newly released 2016 tax filing details show.

According to the tax filings published by Buzzfeed and obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of the total $19 million donated to nonprofits by the Mercer Family Foundation in 2016 went to groups working, at least partially, on spreading misinformation around climate change and pushing to repeal environmental protections. Many of the groups that received donations have promoted carbon dioxide as nonpolluting, called for the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, and, over the past year, funneled officials into the Trump administration.

The Mercers have quickly become known as some of the most powerful and secretive donors behind President Donald Trump. The family has given millions of dollars to conservative causes through its foundation, prompting Bloomberg News to describe Robert as “the man who out-Koched the Kochs”.

As the filings show, the Mercers gave $125,000 to the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a nonprofit based in Arizona which also goes by the name CO2 Science. Another $150,000 was donated to the CO2 Coalition, a small Virginia-based nonprofit with the tagline, “Carbon dioxide, a nutrient vital for life.” This contribution makes the Mercers the CO2 Coalition’s largest donor. Both organizations work exclusively on activities that promote a false uncertainty regarding the link between carbon emissions and their impact on global temperatures.

A series of other donations also went to groups that work in part to promote climate science denial, including: $2 million to the Media Research Center, $800,000 to the Heartland Institute, $500,000 to the Heritage Foundation, $300,000 to the Cato Institute, $200,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and $200,000 to the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine.

Many of the organizations that received money from the Mercers have been consistently working to bring their anti-environmental agenda to the White House — from stacking the new administration with friendly faces to promoting fossil fuels and undermining the Paris climate agreement.

After the November 2016 election, Trump began assembling his transition team. One of the most influential forces in shaping its members was the Heritage Foundation, according to Politico. Rebekah Mercer, who sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, was part of the transition team’s executive committee and, according to Politico, she worked with Heritage to recruit appointees to the transition team.

The Heritage Foundation and its affiliate, Heritage Action for America, were both signatories to an official January 2017 letter of support for Scott Pruitt, calling on the Senate to “swiftly approve his nomination” as administrator to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Heartland Institute also signed this letter. Pruitt’s nomination was approved one month later.

Kathleen Hartnett-White is also currently in the running for a top environment position as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). During her Senate confirmation hearing last November, Hartnett-White said she did not have “any kind of expertise or even much layman study” of climate change issues. On carbon dioxide she said, “CO2 in the atmosphere has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that contaminates and fouls and all of that that can have direct impact on human health. As an atmospheric gas, it is a plant nutrient.”

This last sentence echoes the CO2 Coalition’s main message on carbon emissions. Hartnett-White sits on the advisory board of the CO2 Coalition and last February spoke at a CO2 Coalition sponsored discussion panel at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference.

The idea that carbon dioxide should not be considered a pollutant is also being promoted by the Fueling Freedom project directed by Hartnett-White at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. This project seeks to “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels” while “building a multi-state coalition to push back against the EPA’s unconstitutional efforts to take over the electric power sector by regulating CO2 via the Clean Power Plan.” In June 2016, Hartnett-White was hosted at a Heartland Institute event on “Fueling Freedom.” While her nomination has been met with resistance in the Senate, if approved, Hartnett-White will likely be another Trump administration voice calling for the repeal of key environmental regulations.

Another potential member of Trump’s team connected to the CO2 Coalition is William Happer, the group’s founder, who has long been rumored to be a front-runner for the position of Trump’s science adviser. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Happer was reported to have met with both Trump and former adviser Steve Bannon. The Mercers funded Bannon’s Breitbart News but recently cut ties with the former White House adviser after his fallout with the Trump administration.

A spokesperson for the Mercer family did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for comment. Neither did any of the eight nonprofit climate denial groups that received donations from the family.

The Heartland Institute has perhaps made one of the most concerted efforts to influence the government agenda on climate change, and not just under the current administration. In a February 2017 report, however, the group’s president Joe Bast wrote that its “primary goal over the next four years is to win the global warming war.”

Both Rebekah and Robert Mercer attended the Heartland Institute’s climate denial conference last year where the government’s regulatory rollback was celebrated. And last September, the EPA reportedly reached out to Heartland to help it identify a list of researchers who reject mainstream scientific consensus on climate change for Pruitt’s “red team” exercise, aimed at poking holes in mainstream climate science. Emails and notes obtained by E&E News revealing the closed door meetings helped to give a “broad look at skeptics’ playbook under the Trump administration.”

Then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt gestures as he answers a question during a news conference in 2013. CREDIT: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

EPA is asking a climate denier think tank for help recruiting its ‘red team’

Finally, Trump’s campaign promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement could not be forgotten. On May 8, 2017 an open letter was sent to Trump urging him to “withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty and to stop all taxpayer funding of UN global warming programs.” Signatories to this letter include the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the CO2 Coalition, and CO2 Science.

On June 1, Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the landmark agreement (although the United States doesn’t officially exit the accord until November of 2020, and could re-enter under a new administration).

Present in the Rose Garden for Trump’s announcement was Heartland President Joe Bast, who later described this as a “sign that our efforts for the past 20 years on the climate change issue have not gone unnoticed.”

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c anal map mercer to freedom partners koch

https://littlesis.org/maps/2928-cambridge-analytica-trump-brexit-fossil-fuels-and-climate-science-denial

https://www.ecowatch.com/rebekah-mercer-and-trump-2528927848.html

More than 200 scientists have called on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to cut ties with board member Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire backer of President Donald Trump who has also funded "climate denial" groups in order to protect the fossil fuel industry's pollution-causing extraction of oil and gas.

"We ask the American Museum of Natural History, and all public science museums, to end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation, and to have Rebekah Mercer leave the American Museum of Natural History Board of Trustees," wrote the group, which includes James Hansen, who first brought climate change to the U.S. government's attention in 1988, and other prominent researchers.

Mercer has held her position on the museum's board since 2013. Along with her billionaire father, Robert Mercer, she oversees the Mercer Family Foundation. The group has donated more than $2 million to organizations that deny the consensus that the earth is in a state of climate crisis driven by human activity.

The foundation's contributions include $800,000 to the Heartland Institute, which holds regular meetingspromoting the denial of climate crisis, and $500,000 to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank which, as recently as this month, has published articles claiming that cold weather proves that the Earth is not warming.

"The most important asset any museum has is its credibility," wrote the scientists. "This can be damaged by ties to donors and board members who are publicly known for investing in climate science obfuscation and opposing environmental solutions."

Mercer has also sought to directly impact the Trump administration's climate policy. She reportedly suggested to the president that Arthur Robinson, who has called scientists' belief in climate crisis "a false religion" and distributed a widely-discredited petition signed by supposed experts which stated that global warming is not harmful, should be named the administration's chief science advisor.

Along with calling for Mercer's dismissal, the letter took issue with "misleading information on climate science in an Exxon-funded exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History," which environmental economist Jonah Busch drew attention to in a tweet last week.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/real-reason-mercers-have-cut-ties-steve-bannon

On Thursday, Rebekah Mercer, the reclusive daughter of right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, issued her first-ever public statement, in which she attempted to distance herself from former White House strategist, current Breitbart chair and future pariah Steve Bannon. "I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected," the statement read. "My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements."

As Buzzfeed reporters Tarini Parti and Joseph Bernstein noted, the statement "left a lot to the imagination about when and where her family stopped being a benefactor to Bannon's efforts."

Now we have something approaching an answer.

According to Jane Mayer, who chronicled the Mercers' grip on right-wing politics in her book "Dark Money," the Republican donors actually severed ties with Bannon months ago over his proposal to create a top income-tax rate of 44 percent for Americans earning more than $5 million annually—a proposal that would have directly impacted the Mercer family.

Jane Mayer

@JaneMayerNYer

Source: Mercer split w/Bannon began long before Wolff book. Real cause? Mercers vs. Bannon's proposed tax hike on millionaires.

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