Introducing TRICKED Podcast, Your Antidote to the Bro-Media Industrial Complex
Episode #1: The Billionaires Who Tricked Us w/ Rick Perlstein.
Tricked is a new podcast from Public Enlightenment about the powerful people warping our minds and how we can all fight for healthier information.
I was thrilled that Rick Perlstein agreed to be my guest for the first episode, The Billionaires Who Tricked Us. As far as I’m concerned, Rick’s the Michael Jordan of historians. He’s written four incredible books about the rise of American conservatism since the 1950s.
We delve into the decades of media manipulation perpetrated by the American conservative movement and the role of wealthy individuals in shaping political narratives. We discuss the historical context of polarization in the U.S. and how right-wing think tanks have influenced public perception. The conversation also touches on the use of racism as a political tool and the importance of fostering connections among individuals to combat divisive narratives.
Tricked will also emphasize the need for us all to love each other and find common ground in the face of billionaire-funded efforts to drive us apart. Rick had some beautiful stuff to say about the need to lift up our humanity for the road ahead.
Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts:
Watch on Youtube:
Get a better feel for the podcast will be about by listening to the trailer here.
If you like what I’m doing here I would be so grateful if you could follow, subscribe, rate, review, share and otherwise engage with the podcast and all of my social accounts. They can be found on the homepage to this website as well as in the show notes of the podcast. Thank you so much.
I also plan on turning the research I do for each episode into something resembling an article. For this first episode, I am including that below. Here’s to healthier information!
The Billionaires Who Tricked Us
Have you arrived at your thoughts about US politics completely on your own?
Or are at least some of your beliefs about subjects like government regulation, abortion, public schools, DEI, or CRT actually the result of a decades-long effort to shift the culture of America?
Our national divide, the deep polarization that mainstream media likes to talk about, was never organic. Americans are contending with the results of a 60 year project, funded by wealthy, extremist billionaires, to trick us all into voting in their best interests.
For our entire lives, a multibillion dollar shit-posting industry has been at work to change our minds. The goal of this effort was to make racist and anti-worker political beliefs held by ultra-conservatives widely acceptable. And to attack anyone who thought differently. We are divided because a small group of angry, reactionary wealthy people made us this way.
In the 2024 election, this project finally achieved total victory. With thousands of think tanks and media operatives working around the clock to pump culture war bullshit into the brains of Americans 24/7, billionaire families with names like the Koch, Scaife, Uihlein, Bradley, Coors, Mercer, Friess, and Wilks finally convinced the voting public to hand them the keys to everything.
I spoke with Rick Perlstein about this for the first episode of my podcast, Tricked. It’s a show about the powerful people warping our minds and how we can all fight for healthier information. Rick is a historian of the conservative movement’s rise in America.
Destroying American Consensus
The 1960s ended with 60% of the public saying they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time. Only 10 years later, in 1980, that figure was down to 25%. At the time of the 2024 election, 35% of Democrats and only 11% of Republicans trusted the government to do what was right.
Much of the right wing billionaire effort focused on eroding trust in government and journalism. Wealthy white business leaders were aggrieved by what they believed was a federal government all too keen on regulating business. To them, protections for consumers and the environment felt like boots on the neck. Future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo expressing alarm that corporations were under attack–almost to the point of extinction. The press, which sought to hold the wealthy and powerful to account, was considered an enemy of business and the conservative project writ large.
Early Attacks On Media
By the early 1970s, conservative politicians were priming their followers to believe that the deep corruption of Watergate was in fact a coup orchestrated by the press against Richard Nixon. They sought to sow distrust in the media to stave off its ability to influence the public’s perception of acts of blatant corruption. They did not want public opinion to be influenced by fact-based journalism regarding government malfeasance. They rejected the notion that the press in a democracy is supposed to hold power accountable.
Indeed, Nixon and his cohort took to referring to the press as “the media” during his presidency as a way of undermining the lofty principles associated with the “press” label. Conservative attacks on the “liberal media,” the idea of ‘working the refs’ in order to induce favorable coverage, began decades earlier than most Americans today realize.
The Nixon White House made it a strategy to pressure the mainstream media into altering their journalism. Memos from White House officials outlined efforts to threaten the broadcast licenses of station owners whose political coverage wasn’t obedient enough.
1970s Republicans had plans for manipulating our information ecosystem on a mass scale. Roger Ailes, who co-created Fox News with Rupert Murdoch in the 90s, was working in the Nixon White House when he drew up a memo titled, “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” In it he wrote, “People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.”
Despite all of this, in 1976 72% of the population trusted mass media a great deal or a fair amount.
Conservative Coalition
By the 1970s the liberals and moderates in the Republican Party were being forced out by its hard core conservative elements. In one of his books, Perlstein writes about a Newsweek correspondent startled to discover that “the right’s idea of broadening the party” was “purifying it.”
The foot soldiers of the New Right opposed abortion, homosexuality, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), affirmative action, and most forms of taxation. In essence, this New Right was a response to the perceived excesses of strides towards equal opportunity afforded by the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and desegregation efforts like Brown v. Board of Education.
Racist, anti-government billionaires decided it was in their best interests to deeply fund the anti-government, anti-desegregation New Right. They’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
By 1986, Ronald Reagan was occupying the White House for his second term and spreading deeply anti-government messages from his position of government leadership, saying at a press conference, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
Billionaire Blight
This web of billionaire donors and their covert operatives used limitless funds to gain influence by ginning up a permanent culture war. They built a professional shitposting enterprise consisting of think tanks and media outlets. They strategically worked the refs, infiltrated universities, and removed regulations like the Fairness Doctrine that had previously placed effective, if mostly nominal, limits on the use of public airwaves (especially radio) to deliver unadulterated partisan speech.
A 1997 report by the National Committee For Responsible Philanthropy outlines in great detail the conservative billionaire strategy to warp society to fit their needs. It chronicles their “concerted effort to undermine — and redirect — academia, Congress, the judiciary, executive branch agencies, major media, and even philanthropy.” The report details conservative think tanks “creating and cultivating public intellectuals and policy leaders” and building a “counter-establishment of research, advocacy, media, legal, philanthropic and religious sector organizations,” noting that the efforts “have paid off handsomely.”
Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and other grant-making organizations belonging to the State Policy Network provided culture altering fodder in the form of easy to read briefs and quickly produced studies–disseminated to mainstream news media who reported on them. In 1995 media references to far right think tanks outnumbered references to center or left of center research institutions by 7 to 1.
The scope was massive. The State Policy Network (SPN), a network of 167 conservative and libertarian think tanks, was formed from a conversation between Ronald Reagan and founder Thomas Roe, who asserted that he felt every state should have its own version of the Heritage Foundation. Reagan replied that Roe should “do something about it.” One member organization of the SPN is the Federalist Society, a group 60,000 strong led by Leonard Leo, that has successfully corrupted the Supreme Court of the United States.
Society Remade
A reminder that at the end of the 1960s, even with a draft for an unjust war, uprisings, civil rights battles, and assassinations, 60% of the public still trusted the government to do what was right most of the time.
At the time of the 2024 election, 35% of Democrats and only 11% of Republicans trusted the government to do what was right.
In a recent Gallup poll, 31% of Americans only 12% Republicans said they felt a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
The collective distrust of news sources that these billionaires sowed means our media landscape is more vulnerable than ever to bad actors. Today’s media landscape looks quite different in terms of technology and the health and viability of fact-based press. 1 in 5 Americans gets their news from social media influencers. People are putting their faith in content creators who say things on behalf of these moneyed interests.
Is it safe to say that anything we see from a MAGA influencer is in some part funded by the ultra-conservative billionaires?
Here is a brief list of influencers and who funds them within this massive influence network that has reshaped American society to the point that the working class just voted against their best interests and in favor of the interests of billionaires who will continue to pick their pockets.
Donor’s Trust
The dark money ATM of the conservative movement, Donor’s Trust is a donor-advised fund. Wealthy people give money to this fund anonymously and advise where the money should go. They claim tax deductions and duck capital gains taxes. In 2021, Donors Trust took in $1 billion. Most of it came from two anonymous donors. It funds:
A defunct effort that targeted mainstream news outlets, labor orgs, democratic politicians.
Metric Media - over 1300 pink slime sites that published over 2,000 stories related to integrity of the 2020 election
Other Metric Media backers are the Uhleins, Koch and Peter Thiel.
Ben Shapiro got $5 million to launch Daily Wire from oil and fracking billionaires who are anti-LGBTQ and anti-climate solutions Farris and Dan Wilks
The Wilks’ also have given millions to Prager U, an unaccredited education program that makes videos to show students, including a cartoon of Frederick Douglass saying slavery wasn’t so bad.
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA - stated mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom. TPUSA is a fake grassroots network on high school and college campuses across the country. It attacks the left and invites white nationalists to speak at their events. It is funded by the Bradley Foundation, Uihlein Family Foundation, Foster Friess, various Koch brothers-affiliated groups, and DonorsTrust.
Christopher Rufo - Rufo and his backers are responsible for you knowing anything about CRT. They placed that issue into culture with their think tank money and influence. Rufo also spreads the attacks against DEI and trans people. Rufo is funded by Koch and Bradley through donor advised funds. Their golden boy, he is a fellow at Heritage, Claremont, and the Manhattan Institute.
Moms For Liberty - This anti-CRT, mask mandates, and anti-LGBTQ fake grassroots organization was started by a Republican operative and got dark money pumped into it right away. M4L was quickly featured on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News and Steve Bannon's War Room. It’s national conference featured groups like Turning Point USA and Heritage.
Parents Defending Education - opposes the factual teaching of racism in K-12 Schools, teacher's unions, and is anti-lgbtq. Funded in part by Donor’s Trust, Coors, and Bradley.
Daily Caller - Led by white supremacist Carlson, this organization was started with $3 million in seed money from billionaire Foster Friess.
Robert Mercer
Gave $10 million to help Bannon turn Breitbart far right.
Funds the Media Research Group, a “watchdog on a mission to correct liberal media bias.”
$10 million dollar stake in Cambridge Analytica which collected Facebook user data to micro-target political ads in 2016.
Dick Uhlein
$82 million dollars to the 2022 midterm election cycle
Family foundation donates heavily to RealClearMedia, RealClearPolling, RealClearPolitics
Also funds the Daily Caller - creation was announced at a Heritage event in 2010
Bradley Foundation is still going strong, having spent $500 million to conservative "public-policy experiments" since 2000.
Briefly on Racism
There is a throughline of racism from the origin of this ultra-conservative movement to today. GOP political operative Lee Atwater made remarks in 1981 about how Republicans won the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves, speaking on “how abstract you handle the race thing.” This concept extends to the modern day, witnessed along the way with the Willie Horton attack ads against Dukakis, to Obama birtherism spread by the likes of Trump, and now to eating the dogs and eating the cats. Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo was interviewed (poorly) on NPR this week and continued this abstraction in appeals to racism by referring to the “Western cultural tradition.”
Below is the text of Atwater’s 1981 remarks.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”
That's the trick ticket. You need the right ticket to ride.