Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Now, I’m going to start out by saying that it will come as no surprise to anyone who regularly listens to this podcast, we often talk about threats to democracy here, and today we’re going to be talking about a rather large one.

In short, what we’re going to be talking about is, I suppose you could call it dark money, money that’s used for political spending to influence the decisions of voters, but the donor isn’t known, the source of the money isn’t known. So in essence, what we’re going to be talking about is over time, how people, typically very wealthy people, but not always, have been using money to sway voters, but doing it in a near invisible way, and even making it look like it’s part of the democratic process.

So dark money isn’t just sneaky money. In the sense that we’re talking about it today, it means people deploying big sums of money strategically and secretly, anonymously, in a way that masquerades as part of the democratic process.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s a really good way to put it, because I think many of us, most of us, would argue that we don’t want big money in politics, and yet most people think that that really is just about lobbying to get lawmakers to put in place laws that favor your business or your income bracket.

The idea of using money to sway the way people talk about politics without them knowing that it’s happening, that’s a really important piece of this, and it’s a piece that’s all around us right now. And there are now organizations that are defined as social welfare nonprofits that are spending massive sums on politics.

These groups don’t have to disclose their donors to the Federal Elections Commission. Of course, there are also political action committees and super political action committees known as Super PACs, which are required to disclose their donors.

Since Citizens United in 2010, we’ve seen an explosion in political spending from both PACs and these social welfare organizations. So the bottom line is that there is way more money in politics and much of it is secret money.

Joanne Freeman:

And what that means is that for us as citizens, the consumers of this kind of information, if we don’t know where things come from, we don’t know who’s generating it, we don’t have any sense of it except that it’s floating around out there in the public sphere. We can’t judge for ourselves the nature of that information. We don’t have a way to understand whether we should or shouldn’t trust something. That’s the point of it.

If democracy is about circulating ideas, and we as American citizens being able to think about the ideas and come to conclusions and vote or act politically on the basis of those ideas and conclusions, this way of using money is kind of burrowing underneath the democratic process to encourage people to think in a strategic way that will help some people specifically, but we don’t perceive that that’s what’s happening.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this, of course, is in the news now for a number of reasons. But really interestingly, recently, a man named Barre Seid, who is 90 years old, he is a manufacturing mogul who, one of whose companies made among other things, power strips. And he donated 1.6 billion dollars to a new non-profit organization run by Leonard Leo, who at the time co-chaired the Federalist Society, which is the right-wing organization that has been behind the stacking of the Supreme Court and the lower courts with Originalists and other right-wing figures.

And Leo, people know about because of his court work but most people had paid very little attention to this manufacturing guy. Leo, as I say, is this kind of king maker. And since 2015, organizations connected to him have spent more than 500 million dollars. Here and now he has at his disposal 1.6 billion dollars. And instead of giving cash, the billionaire, Seid, gave 100% of the shares of his company, Tripp Lite, to the new nonprofit, sold the company to an Irish conglomerate for 1.65 billion.

And by doing that, he was able to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds of the sale and the nonprofit that he set up, Marble Freedom Trust also got to avoid paying taxes. So that’s a 1.6 billion dollar transfer-

Joanne Freeman:

Sleight of hand.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Sleight of hand. And again, we only know about this. Nobody knew that he’d even constructed this non-profit organization, the Marble Freedom Trust, and that Leo was going to run it. Leo had said to people he was pulling back from the Federalist Society, but so he could work on other things.

The only reason we know about this is because of the fact that this transfer of the property came to light. That’s 1.6 billion dollars that are going to be pouring into our political system. And mind you, of course, that money’s going to be earning interest that can also be spent on political issues.

Nobody knew that it happened, that that money was going to be out there pumped into different ways to make people think about politics. It’s really astonishing. 1.6 billion dollars is more than the money spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active not-for-profit organizations that align with the Democrats.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to read you a quote, Heather, that I found when I was poking around in preparation for this episode, because now that people know, now that this is out in the open, this is what Leo said recently to The Washington Post.”Let’s remember that in this country, the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the American Revolution, the early labor movement, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s were all very much fueled by very wealthy people, and oftentimes wealthy people who chose to be anonymous. I think that this is not a bad thing, I think it’s a good thing.” What do you make of that quote?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Two things I make of that quote. The first is, it never ceases to astonish me, when you have people, especially people who feel that they have a right and perhaps even, a duty to shift our country’s political system to shape it around their desires, that seems astonishing to me.

But the other piece of it, I think, is actually somewhat more interesting, and that is yes, in a way, what one does when one gets behind any kind of a movement. And it’s interesting that the ones he picked there were abolitionism, for example, or the civil rights movement, or the labor movement, which obviously is something that I suspect he would not be supportive of in general, any social movement eventually has to have money behind it simply to feed people among other stuff. And we’ll talk about more of the other things they do. But in a way, yes, I think that when you put money behind any kind of a cause, you’re essentially testing it in front of the voters.

But I think what’s different about this moment is the secrecy, the fact that there is so much money and we don’t always know where it comes from. Now, we’ll talk about some people who put money behind things and we do know where they’re coming from, which seems to me to be quite different than when you’re doing it secretly. And it’s extremely difficult to chase it down because certainly with our abilities now to learn as much as we can about Americans through privacy laws, or the lack of privacy laws, for example, people, I think, are being manipulated in ways that they cannot see.

And that’s very different than it was in some of the early periods we’re going to talk about where if you got a pamphlet under your door, you knew you were reading a pamphlet. That’s very different than hearing carefully tailored news stories that match your particular past and make you think about things without you even realizing that you’re being manipulated.

Joanne Freeman:

But I think one of the things here that also is distinctive, that comes out from that quote about all of those movements and the fact that there was anonymous money behind them is, as you just said, Heather, it’s not just that there’s money, secret, anonymous money, it’s huge amounts, often funded by, organized by supporting massive corporations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think the injection there of corporate money, I think is an important distinction as well. But again, I keep coming back to the important piece of this being the secrecy, the amount and the secrecy, because it makes people think about issues in ways that they don’t even know who is making them think the way they are.

And I know nowadays, on the occasions that I see television, all the really vicious attack ads come from organizations that have names like … always have words like America and-

Joanne Freeman:

Liberty.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… tradition and prosperity, and bunny rabbits and daisies.

Joanne Freeman:

There’s a fake commercial advertisement against Thomas Jefferson made that I saw once online for the election of 1800. And at the end, the voice says, “Brought to you by the people who hate Thomas Jefferson.” It’s like, well, that’s pretty blunt.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I worked on that, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. I was waiting. I was just waiting-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m kidding.

Joanne Freeman:

… for you to take the bait.

Heather Cox Richardson:

[inaudible 00:10:23].

Joanne Freeman:

No, I know. I know. But you’re right, it’s secrecy, but I keep saying masquerade because it’s deliberate deception too, and I think those things need to go together because we’re talking about both of those things.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So having mentioned Thomas Jefferson, I am going to throw it back at you and say, if I were to imagine somebody would’ve done something like this in the past, I would look at Thomas Jefferson. Would that be correct?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in this case, we have to join James Madison in the equation too.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s okay.

Joanne Freeman:

You’re okay with that? That’s good. So-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I understand he had a flute. Sorry. But what we’re going to talk about is so incredibly important and honest to God, it was news to me as well as to probably all of our listeners. So take us away on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and …

Joanne Freeman:

Well, Hamilton’s in here too, but mostly it’s about Jefferson, Madison, and a poet/writer named Philip Freneau. So when the new government started, the Washington Administration, the newspapers … So I should say at the time, there were local newspapers, but there really wasn’t anything close to a national newspaper.

And because the government ends up being based in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States starts out acting as a kind of national newspaper, and it’s very much aligned with the Washington administration. It’s very federalist. So it is agreeing with Hamilton and his policies. I think a long time ago I saw an ode to the National Bank in the gazette of the United States. So if you’re writing poetry to a bank, that kind of tells you what side that newspaper is on.

And what happens is in 1791 and then it launches, but what happens is not far into the Washington administration, Jefferson and Madison both begin to realize that there’s one newspaper that’s kind of reaching a national audience in some way that’s very pro administration, what can be done to not allow the federalist point of view to just take over and control the conversation?

So Jefferson, and ultimately along with Madison, basically creates another newspaper intended to be a national newspaper, but this one is intended to be anti-administration. You have the most evil smile on your face, Heather.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I’m sorry. I love this stuff because you make it come to life. But I have to point out that whenever you say basically, before something Jefferson’s going to do, you just know he’s going to do something evil. It’s like you tell. Whenever you’re like, “Well, basically,” it’s like, here it comes. Here it comes.

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t even notice that, but you’re absolutely right. So in 1791, Jefferson writes to a fellow Virginian and says, “You will have perceived that the Gazette of the United States is a paper of pure Toryism, disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy and the exclusion of the influence of the people. We have been trying to get another weekly or half weekly paper set up, excluding advertisements so that it might go through the states and furnish a wig vehicle of intelligence.”

So Jefferson thinks of Philip Freneau … Madison actually went to college with Freneau, who was already a well known poet in the era and is a good friend of Madison’s. And they turn to him and essentially discuss with him becoming the editor of a newspaper that will be based in Philadelphia, that will be directly opposed to the Gazette of the United States and will counter its pro administration views. And they discuss this, and Freneau is talented, they ultimately invite him to come to Philadelphia. But here’s the part where we move into the territory of what we’re discussing today.

So Jefferson invites him to become a clerk in the State Department, to become a translator. Jefferson at this point is Secretary of State, and he says, “Freneau, if you come to Philadelphia, I can give you a job here, a translator of the State Department,” and receives a $250 annual government stipend. You can be supported that way. Doesn’t say, “And by the way, you’ll be editing a newspaper favorable to us.” He just says, “You should be a translator and work for me.”

So in essence, he funds this guy to come to Philadelphia, doesn’t, in any way, reveal his or Madison’s connection with it. Freneau just comes to Philadelphia, happens to start up a newspaper and happens to be supported financially by Jefferson because newspapers in this period notoriously never make any money. So there’s no way that that newspaper would’ve survived without giving Freneau some kind of a salary.

And the National Gazette is really, really aggressively, ultimately what becomes Jeffersonian Republican anti-federalists, extremely anti-federalists. By 1792, the two newspapers are going at each other with such ferocity that even George Washington notices. And for a while I think he thought, “Oh, they disagree about policy.” But by 1792, he actually steps in and tries to get Jefferson and Hamilton to get along, which really doesn’t happen.

Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to expose this for what it is, not because he’s being virtuous and saying, “Oh, this is secret money,” along the lines of what we’re talking about today. Rather, he just wants the newspaper and Freneau to be gone. So he begins writing under a pseudonym, essay after essay after essay, basically saying the Secretary of State is paying for a translator and he isn’t really a translator.

What does he translate? He translates French. It’s the only language he knows. And Jefferson actually speaks and writes that. So this seems pretty feeble to me. He’s not here to be a translator. He was brought here by the Secretary of State to run a newspaper, to attack the administration, and he hammers that home again and again and again and again.

He actually uses different pseudonyms in different newspapers within the same week so that it sounds like public sentiment is wildly swirling against Jefferson, even though it’s only this one guy writing all the editorials. But it’s a great example of this idea that the newspaper is created, it’s just coming up with this anti-Washington administration bent. And Hamilton is trying to expose it, not for virtuous reasons, but just to out the influence of it as something that’s purely being funded by Republicans, purely serving their interest, hardly represents, according to Hamilton, at least, unbiased public opinion.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So really interestingly there though, Hamilton also tries to influence public opinion secretly or duplicitously by writing the letters under different names at the same time. And that idea of controlling the public sphere and public debate by making it look like there is a popular ground swell of support for something is, I find it fascinating.

This was supposed to be so revolutionary when Nixon’s dirty tricks, people did it quite literally. I mean, he had people writing letters to newspapers as if they were Sally Jones, the housewife, when she was in fact some guy sitting there doing it in the Dirty Tricks campaign. But the fact that we’re doing it way back at the beginning …

Joanne Freeman:

I will say I am the queen of dirty tricks in early American politics at this point in my career.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s fair.

Joanne Freeman:

But what’s distinctive about this, I should add, is not necessarily the pseudonym because most people who wrote political essays were writing under pseudonyms. What’s distinctive about what Hamilton is doing here is what you just said, which is the groundswell component. I’m going to write for four different newspapers every week, and it’s going to sound like everyone understands what this is and everyone is attacking it.

Jefferson goes berserk over it. Jefferson is outraged because he can see precisely what’s happening. But that idea of strategically in a broad sense, at least for early America, papering the public with a view to make the public appear that that’s the truth and that’s what people thinks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love that Jefferson is furious, that somebody has out maneuvered his own dirty trick.

Joanne Freeman:

I have to add one other Jefferson, it’s not a dirty trick, but it’s just, it’s so wonderful and it has to do with this newspaper. Jefferson tries really hard to get the newspaper spread, to get subscriptions to it. And he actually tells someone in, I think Virginia, and if you can get 10 people to subscribe to the National Gazette, you get your own subscription free.

So it’s like a game plan. You get 10 people to subscribe, you get your own free, which is just sort of, I don’t even know, that’s not quite a pyramid scheme, but it’s a weird thing, it’s a weirdly manipulative thing happening at that particular moment in time with Jefferson being like the guy pawning newspaper subscriptions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I was going to say that he offered to provide the man with a secret decoder ring.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You do all this, you get the secret, or maybe a crystal flute.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, back to the flute.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s interesting because then we run into that same sort of idea on a much larger scale in the late 19th century, because in the earlier period, and we’ve talked about this elsewhere, the rise of partisan newspapers and the funding of partisan newspapers through printing contracts and the funding of political campaigns through literally hitting up office holders for a portion of their salaries that they had to kick back in or lose their jobs, by the 1870s, that system has come under attack.

And we get in 1883, the idea of a civil service where you’re not supposed to have to kick back money because your job is supposed to be about your skill, not who you vote for. And there’s a real problem after that in 1884, the Republican party, which at that point is really tightly bound to the rising industrialists lose because they’ve gotten so corrupt that a lot of Republicans switch and vote for the Democrats in 1884 and they put Grover Cleveland in office. And the big money, the corporate interests in America at the time really think this is the road to perdition.

They are, the apocalypse is coming, this has to be stopped. And so they determine instantly that they’re going to make sure there’s a Republican in office in the presidency after the 1888 election, but how on earth are they going to make that happen? And they take the same approach that, I guess, both Jefferson and Hamilton did.

They decide they have to convince people who have voted for Grover Cleveland in ’84 to vote for a Republican in 1888, even though his policies, the Republican policies of high tariffs protecting big business are really unpopular.

So what they do is, again, unobvious, it flies below the radar screen to the point that most people are probably going to be surprised when I say what name is associated with this change in … what amounts to a major change in campaign financing, really the birth of modern campaign financing. And it’s at the hands of John Wanamaker who creates the new concept of department stores.

He actually goes to work in the 1888 election for Benjamin Harrison, who is the Republican candidate for president. And what Wanamaker does is he puts together committees of businessmen who themselves are supposed to go create smaller committees of businessmen. And there is your pyramid scheme, Joanne.

And the idea is they’re supposed to pour money into the Republican coffers, create what became known as a war chest. And the trick to that is with that money, what they’re doing with it is not paying people off or whatever people think of when they think about the role of big money in politics, what they’re doing is they are creating pamphlets and other forms of mass media really, speeches and pamphlets and letters and columns in newspapers that make it look as if the conversation is changing and people actually really like the high tariffs and that the Democrats, if they get into office again, are … socialists is a word they use a lot. They might be anarchists, they’re going to destroy the country, and it works.

Wanamaker ultimately raises about $200,000 for Benjamin Harrison. That’s the most that had ever been raised at that point in a presidential contest. And that idea of using corporate money essentially to blanket the country with point of view that people don’t necessarily recognize as coming from in this case, Wanamaker and his friends really is, I think, really illustrative of this idea of sort of secret money changing the political conversation.

I will say in that election, Harrison didn’t win. He loses by about 250,000 votes and they win in the electoral college. But definitely this idea of using big money to change the political conversation through advertising is straight out of the 1888 election.

Joanne Freeman:

But here’s the thing that’s interesting about this idea of secrecy, and that is, I’ll bet a lot of people listening, they may not know the name of Puck Magazine, but I’ll bet they have seen some of the images, the cartoons from it.

Beginning in 1877, this political satirical magazine called Puck begins to be published, very famous for its cartoon satires, but it also has poems and ballads and stories and jokes and a variety of other things in it. And it’s named Puck actually explicitly after the character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare who says, and it’s the mass head of the newspaper, “What fools these mortals be.”

And Puck was anti-corruption no matter what party it came from, it was just uniformly anti-corruption. And if you’ve seen these images and they always look, or at least as a historian I can say, they look very 19th century. These images of these big money bags, figures, they’re always like these round shaped men gripping in their hands, big bags of money that represent big business. Those are Puck magazine-ish illustrations.

When you look up to see what they’re saying in this time period, they’re saying very openly over and over and over again that Harrison, figuratively and literally is in Wanamaker’s pocket. So for example, I found a cartoon in which there’s a big figure of Wanamaker in one hand, he’s gripping money. I think it even says like $200,000. And literally in his pocket is Benjamin Harrison, just sitting there with a hat that’s too big because I think it represents William Henry Harrison who was a heroic figure and a more famous person in his way than Benjamin Harrison was.

But so, it’s a secret. We’re not supposed to know it’s happening, but you can say that Puck Magazine was pretty blunt in calling it out for what it was, and for a while became the most popular magazine of its sort reaching nearly 90,000 subscribers in the 1890s. And then ultimately it was surpassed by other publications. So it’s unknown, but at least there are people calling it out for what it is, the influence of it being called out is another question. But there were people who were bright identifying it as corruption.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Certainly at the time there were. But again, what’s interesting about those different images at the time and the way we think about it, even in a lot of our textbooks, we look at the influence of money in the … especially after 1888 when it was really being called out. And people think about lobbying, they think about rich guys buying laws through kickbacks to lawmakers, through fancy parties, through letting them ride free on the railroads. They think about buying the legislators. But it seems to me the key piece we’re identifying is the use of that money, that secret money to change the political conversation without people knowing it’s happening.

Joanne Freeman:

With a private citizen changing-

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

… that conversation. A money maker, a corporate figure. Some of the cartoons do emphasize that idea, which is he’s this private citizen sort of broadcasting out his views and he is the one that matters, and he is the one that has power and not the person who he’s supporting for office.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and that his power is not only in supporting Harrison, his power is in convincing the workers of Detroit, for example, that they’re better off under Republican policies than they are under Democratic policies, which it was coming to them in notes in their paychecks. It was coming to them in letters, in the newspaper, it was coming to them in pamphlets. It was essentially mass marketing without it being grassroots, rising from the grassroots, rising quite literally from Wanamaker and Wanamaker’s war chest to convince people to think in a certain way.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, mass marketing succeeds when the emphasis is on the mass, that it’s popular, that it’s widespread, that it represents something broad and sweeping. And that’s precisely the kind of thing that we’re talking about today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if we jump forward, that shows up really dramatically with Richard Viguerie. Richard Viguerie is the man who during Goldwater’s campaign, recognized that because Goldwater was not picking up the big money endorsements of people who until then had been really monopolizing funding or had really been doing most of the donating for political funding, he recognizes that the way to get people behind Goldwater’s campaign is through direct marketing.

And then in 1965, after Goldwater loses, Viguerie, he starts his own direct mail business for right wing causes. It was called the Richard A. Viguerie Company or RAV Co. And what he did is he pulled together mailing lists from other organizations that seemed to be right-leaning.

So for example, he took lists from the National Review started in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. to tell, as it said, “The violated businessman’s side of the story.” He got the list from Field & Stream, gun groups, farming organizations. He put together these lists, and by 1975, just 10 years later, he was mailing 50 million fundraising letters each year.

So he’s raising money from them, but at the same time as people are opening these letters, they’re hearing a version of American history and of American politics that is reaching them very directly. And he’s really the first to do it. So people are paying a lot of attention to it.

For example, in 1974, he had increasingly slid behind people like George Wallace and one of his mailings said, “Dear friend, are you as sick and tired as I am of liberal politicians who force children to be bused, appoint judges who turn murderers and rapists loose on the public, force your children to study from schoolbooks that are anti-God, anti-American, and filled with the most vulgar curse words, give your tax money to communists, anarchists, and other radical organizations, do nothing about sex, adultery and homosexuality, and foul language on television? Are you tired of feeling no power to change things? If so, why don’t you join the Conservative Caucus?”

Joanne Freeman:

And I want to just repeat there, murderers, rapists, anti-God, Anti-American, communists, anarchists, radical sex, adultery, homosexuality. That’s just the whole bundle of culture war stuff all in one big statement. And all of those things are guaranteed to get your blood flowing and guaranteed to get your temper raised. So if you’re trying to appeal to people emotionally and to pull them into a cause with a sense of outrage and righteousness, that’s pretty effective.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this direct mail campaign is key to really spreading those right wing ideas that in the 1950s were considered extraordinarily fringe, but reaching directly into people’s homes with this version of the world that really flew below the radar screen for a lot of observers at the time who saw this, the middle of the 1960s, and really into the 1970s as a really flowering of the liberal consensus, a lot of them missed that this was happening.

Joanne Freeman:

So an important thing to recall here with Viguerie and this kind of emotion laden negative campaigning is we’ve been talking a lot about presidents or presidential administrations, and he really is just trying to fund and push a worldview that he likes.

So for example, he pushed and backed conservative candidates that he liked, some of them just people who were a little too centrist for his taste. So for example, when Rudy Giuliani challenged Hillary Clinton in the election for US Senator from New York in 2000, Giuliani hired Viguerie to run his direct mail campaign.

And President Bill Clinton had a lot to say about Giuliani’s choice during an interview that he did with CBS News’ Dan Rather in April of 2000. Clinton said, “Richard Viguerie is doing Mayor Giuliani’s mail.” Mayor Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York, basically said, ‘I’m not a Reagan Republican anymore. I’m a moderate Republican. I’m pro choice. I’m for the Brady Bill, I’m for the assault weapons ban, I’m for the president’s crime program. We work together, we had a good relationship.’

Now he’s got Richard Viguerie doing this venomous mailing, talking about what a left wing crazy my wife is, while he was mayor of New York, he was in agreement with her and me on most issues.”

So it’s really voicing the idea that Viguerie is pushing who Viguerie wants to push. And Clinton may be expressing outrage that, “Hey, you liked me before and now what?” But this is about Viguerie, this is about what he wants and what he thinks is right more than anything else.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it’s interesting because many people have not heard of Richard Viguerie and have not recognized that his changing of the political conversation through direct mailings was an extension, again, of a fairly small group in this case of very well connected right-wing thinkers, putting money behind certain candidates and spreading these ideas without most people realizing where that spreading was coming from.

Joanne Freeman:

If you think about it, the same holds true for Wanamaker as well as Viguerie. We’re talking about these people. The story that we’re telling is that these are people with an extraordinary amount of power and reach who hid the fact that they had an extraordinary amount of power and reach, but were king makers of a very real sort. And yet most people listening to the show probably will not have heard of either of these people. And that’s the way they wanted it. They were not eager to be front and center. They were eager to have influence. They were not eager to be seen as king makers. I think the best kind of king maker, best meaning most effective is the one that’s invisible. And I think they very well knew that, that you can affect things in a democracy through not really persuasion, but flooding the public, using emotion, using all kinds of ways in which you can yank people into your corner.

If you do that without making it look as though you’re doing that, that can be very effective. It makes me think of a quote from actually a newspaper in, I want to say like the 70, 90s when someone said in the American Republic, “Government in a republic is government by sleight of hand. You never want to show the strings being pulled, you always want to make it look as though the public’s doing the pulling of the strings.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

But don’t you think that means we ought to have a way to have transparency? I mean, one of the things that really jumps out about some of the people we’re talking about is, for example, when Leonard Leo got control of that giant pot of money, the argument he made was that he was pushing back against Democrats like George Soros. And the obvious answer to that is Soros operates in the open.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s why we know his name.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. And it seems to me we ought to be able to tell where the money comes from that we’re listening to. When you get those happy little ads that say, “Paid for by the people who love-“

Joanne Freeman:

People who hate Thomas Jefferson.

Heather Cox Richardson:

“… Joanne.” That’s right. It’s not that way. It’s more like paid for by the-

Joanne Freeman:

People who love America.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, exactly. It makes it hard to know what is real and what is not. And that’s-

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s deliberate deception. That’s deliberate deception. So that you, the person listening to that message, cannot judge the content of it, cannot judge where it’s coming from, are left deliberately in some degree of darkness.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So does this, Joanne, does this make you change the way you think about the First Amendment?

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, now there’s a question.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because again, and mind you, this idea has been, I think, used in ways that were not intended. But when you think about where we are right now with Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission decision of the Supreme Court, that opened up the floodgates for this kind of opaque money to affect what we hear, which in turn affects the way that we think.

And if you’re going to do that, if you’re going to say everybody has the right to free speech even in extraordinary amounts so that you change the psychological operation, if you will, of a democracy, does that mean that we have to rethink the way we think about the First Amendment?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, there’s a lot of defining that has to happen there, though. Political spending is a form of free speech, is part of what is in that equation. So political spending in the case of Citizens United to create this anti-Hillary film that was going to be sent out within a window of time before an election when it should not have been allowed to be that, and Citizens United determined that it was okay for it to become out of that time because of free speech.

So for one thing, you need to define what free speech is, and I don’t mean that in a sense that you need to winnow it down so it has a very narrow definition. But I think transparency and free speech are not necessarily opposed to each other. I mean, I think if we knew who was funding things, the words would still be out there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I just have to read this statistic here. According to the Brennan Center, which is this amazing group who follows voting and democratic issues in America, they have found that since the Citizens United decision, 12 mega donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid $1 out of every 13 spent in federal elections. But the question for me is, how do you stop that, Joanna? I want to hear a solution because I think we can probably all agree that it’s a problem.

Joanne Freeman:

And it’s a growing problem.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s a growing problem.

Joanne Freeman:

Because the Brennan Center also found that with three weeks to go until the election, outside groups had already spent 1.3 billion dollars in political advertising.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The numbers are just off the charts.

Joanne Freeman:

The numbers are astronomical. And that’s, of course, because people feel the stakes are beyond high and they feel particularly because of the lack of transparency, that there’s opportunity here to say things, any variety of things, open lies, denying facts in a way that can really wield a lot of power for people who are eager and willing to do those things.

And you said you want a solution, Heather, I swear to you, if I had one, I’d offer it. I don’t know what it is, except to call it out when we see it, to expose it when we see it, to show it for what it is, so that if nothing else, people have a sense that they can’t just believe what they see blindly without understanding where it’s coming from.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let me just throw into the mix there though, privacy laws I think would help a lot because it would make it much harder for us to be secretly targeted without us knowing it. If organizations, especially on social media, can’t exchange our information to the extent that they can draw psychological portrait, I think that would help with the kind of micro-targeting that I find so insidious right now. Algorithms so that social media can’t privilege certain speech over other speech. And we’ve talked about that before, and by that generally they’re looking for a speech that makes you angry because you get more engaged.

And then here’s one for you. I wonder if what would go a really long way to this, to stopping the sort of thing we’re talking about is a much more progressive tax code. And I can see you being like, you had to work taxes in there.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m in my listening posture.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If you think about the period from 1933 to 1981, when we had a compression of both wealth and income in America, there really wasn’t any point to trying so hard to buy control of the political system because the chances of you getting the kind of sweeping laws that the Republican party in America has called for, if they take back over Congress, the more tax cuts for the wealthy are what just happened with Liz Truss’s government in England where they had put in place these big tax cuts, and of course the pound collapsed and she had to resign.

But you couldn’t have these sweeping pieces of legislation that would create the extraordinary wealth that we have that then in turn can be used to do things like set up 1.6 billion dollars for one guy to use secretly. So I wonder if at the end of the day, the real trick is not the things like Citizens United so much as the society that created Citizens United and made it worthwhile to try and game the system.

Joanne Freeman:

You talked about privacy rights, you talked about algorithms, you talked about taxes, you talked about wealth disparity. All of those things are involved in the precise thing that we’re talking about here. But you’re absolutely right, all of those things are involved and what that shows is that what we’re talking about, it’s not just a political problem, it’s a social problem, it’s a national problem, it’s a democratic problem, and in the end, it’s going to be something large scale like that that will determine the result that goes far beyond politics. It really has to do with who we are as a nation and what kind of nation we want to be.