Mindfuck

  Mercer’s investment was used to fund an offshoot of SCL, which Bannon named Cambridge Analytica. I can only imagine what Bob and Rebekah Mercer would have thought if they had seen the pulsating hedonistic shit show their investment had enabled. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, probably would have loved it.

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  IT WAS SPRING 2014 and ten o’clock at night, several months after the dinner in New York, and as we sped through rural Tennessee, a sudden rush of chilly air cleared my head and lungs. The chain-smoking driver, Mark Block, had hotboxed the car, forcing us to open the windows. In the back of the car sat Gettleson and me. Clouds of nicotine escaped into the dark as we drove along desolate roads, surrounded by inky forests. I was back in the United States, setting up pilot projects for Cambridge Analytica, and Block was my guide. As SCL’s introducer to Bannon, Block was excited about the potential of this project, and although he wasn’t able to help build our models, he knew America like the back of his hand.

  “I got some beers in the back,” Block said. “Have one.” Why not? I thought, and the beer and conversation began to flow. Block was one of the more fascinating alt-right characters I’d encountered—both a super-friendly midwesterner with a warm smile and a seasoned GOP operative who had cut his teeth in the Nixon years.

  “Let me tell you why Nixon was one of our best presidents,” he said out of the blue.

  “Okay, I’ll bite—why?”

  “Because he fucked rats.”

  “Wait—what?”

  “Democrats. He fucked so many Democrats,” he laughs. “Back then you could get away with anything.”

  “Ohhhhh, right.”

  “It’s why my firm is called Block RF.”

  Block had once been barred by the Wisconsin State Elections Board from running campaigns in that state because of alleged shady dealings during a judge’s reelection bid, although this was later resolved through Block voluntarily paying a $15,000 fine without any admission of wrongdoing. In his years as head of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group, he’d created a vast network of right-wing organizations that one watchdog group dubbed the “Blocktopus.” For him, politics was not about ideas or policy—that was all bullshit for the true believers like Rebekah Mercer. For him, politics was guerrilla warfare, where he could play Che.

  Another of Block’s coups was Herman Cain’s accidentally brilliant “smoking ad.” As Cain’s chief of staff when he ran for president in 2012, Block appeared in a campaign spot in which he mostly just rambled, the camera zooming in tight on his face. His gray mustache fell messily over his purple lips, charred from the cigarettes he smoked.

  “I really believe that Herman Cain will put the ‘United’ back in the United States of America,” he says, shaking his head for emphasis. As the ad closes, he stares into the camera and sucks on a cigarette, casually exhaling smoke while the Krista Branch song “I Am America!” swells in the background. This was almost shocking, as the FCC had banned cigarette advertisements on TV and radio back in 1971. But it was Block’s personal touch, his way of flipping the bird to political correctness.

  I enjoyed hanging out with Block—he was quite an endearing guy and would always ask how you were doing, though I also knew that he wouldn’t hesitate to screw you over on a campaign. The more we talked, the more it seemed to me that he didn’t really believe in the hateful ideas the alt-right stood for—he just embraced the aesthetics of revolt. He relished his role as an eternal rebel with a cause inside his niche of the Republican Party, and we bonded over our mutual enjoyment of defying the establishment.

  And that’s how we began our work for Cambridge Analytica, the history-changing project that would fuel Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the death of personal privacy: hotboxing our way across the United States.

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  IN EARLY 2014, the first people CA sent over to the United States to do focus groups were sociologists and anthropologists, none of whom were American. This was intentional. There’s a tendency among Americans to see their country as exceptional, but we wanted to study it like we would study any country, using the same language and sociological approaches. It was fascinating to explore America this way, and because I’m not American myself, I felt I was more able to cut through unquestioned assumptions of American culture and notice things that Americans don’t see in themselves. When it comes to what’s happening in other places, Americans will talk about “tribes,” “regimes,” “radicalization,” “religious extremists,” “ethnic conflicts,” “local superstitions,” or “rituals.” Anthropology is for other people, not Americans. America is supposedly this “shining city upon a hill,” a term Ronald Reagan famously popularized, adapting it from the biblical story of the Sermon on the Mount.

  But when I would see evangelists prophesying the end times and woe unto the nonbelievers, when I watched a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, when I saw a gun show with bikini-clad ladies carrying semi-automatics, when I heard white people talk about “black thugs” and “welfare queens,” I saw a country deep in the throes of ethnic conflict, religious radicalization, and a bubbling militant insurgency. America is addicted to its own self-conception, and it wants to be exceptional. But it’s not. America is just like any other country.

  There were places in the United States that felt as foreign as any place I’d been. Just before the Mercers decided to invest in SCL, Nix, Jucikas, and I met with possible backers in rural Virginia. A car took us from Washington, D.C., through the wealthy suburbs, and then finally down a long road running deep into the woods. Eventually we came to a small clearing with a farmhouse, miles from any other sign of civilization. The guy who was driving us said nothing, our phones no longer had a signal, and it felt like the opening scene of a horror film.

  Inside the farmhouse, we were shown into a windowless boardroom with high-tech screens that came out of the ceiling. And then a group of NRA activists came in and, like clockwork, each one pulled out a gun and laid it on the table. The only time I’d seen anything like this was in Bosnia—but at least Bosnians will put their guns neatly on a rack. This was like something out of a Mafia movie, or a meeting of warlords in Afghanistan. I didn’t say anything, because when a bunch of men put their guns on the table, you can’t really say, “Sorry, these guns are a little aggressive and making me uncomfortable.”

  The United States has its own origin myths, its own extremist groups. At SCL, I had the displeasure of watching countless propaganda videos disseminated by ISIS and deadbeat wannabe African warlords. The way members of jihadist cults fetishize their guns is no different from the way members of the NRA fetishize theirs. I knew that if we were going to truly study America, we needed to do it as if we were studying tribal conflict—by mapping out the country’s rituals, superstitions, mythologies, and ethnic tensions.

  Gettleson was one of the most productive researchers we sent. During the spring and summer of 2014, he went all across the United States, convening focus groups, having conversations with people, and then sending reports back to London. We would then generate theories and hypotheses to test in our quantitative research. Gettleson is an extremely charming and witty Brit, so it was easy for him to get people talking. He quickly observed a disconnect between Americans and their day-to-day politics. For example, people kept talking, unprompted, about the seemingly obscure issue of congressional term limits. They’d say over and over that the big problem in Washington is that the politicians stay in office too long and get bought by special interests. At one focus group in North Carolina, a couple of people used the phrase “Drain the swamp,” so he included that in the notes he sent back, too. CA would later study that phrase using multivariate tests on online panels of target voters, to see whether it resonated with voters.

  Over a six-week period, Gettleson visited Louisiana, North Carolina, Or
egon, and Arkansas. In each state, Block connected him with people who would drive him around and help with logistics. I had asked him to focus on intersectionality—and in particular, finding people who were normally lumped into one category but had different political views. So he’d convene a focus group of, say, Latino Republicans, Latino Democrats, and Latino independents. As in Virginia, we used a market research company to find the participants.

  The results were eye-opening, even for someone who had already spent a lot of time in the United States. Gettleson’s field reports, emailed from the road, described a country nearing a nervous breakdown.

  In New Orleans, at a focus group of Hispanic independents, he met a hardcore conservative who declared, “I’m not registering as a Republican because I’m a real conservative. I may have a Latino name, but I’m as American as they come!” At the other end of the table was a Peruvian convert to Islam who had worn her hijab to the meeting.

  When the conversation shifted to guns, she told the man he might change his mind about the NRA if it were led by someone who looked like her. His answer was simple: “I’d just go and buy another gun.” Later, the woman excused herself from the group to find a spare room where she could pray, leaving the conservative superman dumbfounded: I don’t know how to respond to this. I have a problem with it, but I can’t tell a person they can’t pray.

  Religion and guns were hardly the only hot-button issues Gettleson encountered in Louisiana, which was fertile ground for research, thanks to its super-varied ethnic diversity. Immigration also stoked heated debates, with more than a few almost escalating into fistfights.

  A man named Lloyd, speaking with a Cajun accent that Gettleson found almost indecipherable, came across loud and clear in venting his disgust that the schools in his parish no longer taught his native French. He was furious that his granddaughter was being denied the chance to learn the “culture and heritage” of her Cajun forebears.

  It wasn’t fifteen minutes before the same man launched into a rant about Latinos, how even in America they wouldn’t stop speaking Spanish. Somehow, no one in the group saw the disconnect—that Lloyd could rant against Spanish people for speaking Spanish but still speak incomprehensibly in semi-French and bemoan the loss of his own heritage.

  Ethnicity and race fueled several other ugly moments. In one focus group, after hearing a chorus of complaints about President Obama, Gettleson asked, “Does anyone not feel disappointed by the president?” The room was silent except for a young guy who until now had come off as exceedingly polite and courteous.

  “I don’t feel disappointed,” he said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, he’s the first black president, so I wasn’t expecting nothing.”

  In that room, no one batted an eye, but other focus groups seemed to puncture partisan bubbles. All the same, full-blown arguments were not the norm; most participants made an effort to avoid conflict, even when they clearly disagreed. One exception came in Fort Smith, Arkansas, when a photo of Obama prompted a well-dressed lady to say, “I’ll go to my car and get my gun.” A younger man snapped: “How fucking dare you! That is our president. Do not even joke about that.”

  To Gettleson’s eye, the woman had never in a million years considered that her views of the president might be challenged.

  America’s love affair with guns came up repeatedly, even in liberal bastions like Portland, Oregon, where a tattooed hipster might pause in delivering her progressive wish list to worry aloud that the Obama administration was hell-bent on seizing her firearms. On a food run for an Oregon focus group, Gettleson watched in disbelief as the driver left his massive handgun on the driver’s seat before running into Subway to grab their sandwiches. “I’ve never seen a handgun before,” Gettleson told me later. “I’m thinking, The car is unlocked—what if someone sees the gun, reaches in, and grabs it? Should I put it away? There seems to be a type of gun holder—should I put it in there? What if I accidentally fire it? For two minutes of my life, I literally sat there staring at this gun as if it were a bomb in the car.”

  A lot of the Oregonians Cambridge Analytica spoke to were obsessed with big government and “Big Enviro.” One of them was the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, Art Robinson, whose multiple losing bids for the U.S. House of Representatives hadn’t discouraged the Mercers from supporting his political ambitions. I went to visit him in his home, deep in the woods of Cave Junction, Oregon, and found him to be unhinged, even by alt-right standards.

  Robinson, a biochemist who had worked with the Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, had two interests outside the lab: pipe organs and piss. He salvaged defunct nineteenth-century organs from churches and cathedrals all over the world and would spend hours taking them apart and reassembling them.

  Robinson also collected urine from thousands of people, in an effort to discover the secrets of disease and longevity. He had become fixated on health and aging after his wife, Laurelee, died suddenly of an undetected illness at age forty-three. At the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which he founded and based at his home, he ran pee through a giant spectrometer to determine its chemical composition. Animals—some dead, some alive—were everywhere. Cats, dogs, sheep, and horses roamed the property, while inside, a zebra skin and the heads of a deer and a buffalo hung from the walls. Spiders had taken over the rafters and the place smelled of unwashed animals. There were several fully assembled pipe organs salvaged from old churches and cathedrals.

  Robinson seemed to have tipped over the edge. He insisted that climate change was a hoax, argued that low doses of ionized radiation can be good for people, and warned that chemtrails were poisoning the population. Imagine my reaction when, a few years later, he was considered for the position of President Trump’s scientific adviser.

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  THERE ARE TWO TYPES of billionaires: those who can never make enough money and those who, after making enough to last multiple lifetimes, turn their attention to changing the world. Mercer was the latter. Although Cambridge Analytica was created as a business, I learned later that it was never intended to make money. The firm’s sole purpose was to cannibalize the Republican Party and remold American culture. When CA launched, the Democrats were far ahead of the Republicans in using data effectively. For years, they had maintained a central data system in VAN, which any Democratic campaign in the country could tap into. The Republicans had nothing comparable. CA would close that gap.

  Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society” was by creating simulations: If we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer, we could remake America in his image. Beyond the technology and the grander cultural strategy, investing in CA was a clever political move. At the time, I was told that because he was backing a private company rather than a PAC, Mercer wouldn’t have to report his support as a political donation. He would get the best of both worlds: CA would be working to sway elections, but without any of the campaign finance restrictions that govern U.S. elections. His giant footprints would remain hidden.

  The structure chosen to set up this new entity was extremely convoluted, and it even confused staff working on projects, who were never sure who exactly they actually worked for. SCL Group would remain the “parent” of a new U.S. subsidiary, incorporated in Delaware, called Cambridge Analytica. For a principal investment of $15 million, Mercer took 90 percent ownership of Cambridge Analytica, and SCL would take 10 percent. This setup was so that CA could operate in the United States as an American company while keeping SCL’s defense division a “British” company. Therefore, SCL would not have to notify the U.K. Ministry of Defence or its other government clients of the new ownership and Mercer’s involvement. However, this subsidiary was bestowed the IP rights to SCL’s work, creating a bizarre situation where the subsidiary a
ctually owned the core assets of its “parent.” SCL and Cambridge Analytica then signed an exclusivity agreement whereby Cambridge Analytica would transfer all of its contracts to SCL, and SCL’s personnel would service the actual delivery and work on behalf of Cambridge Analytica. And then, to allow SCL staff to use the IP that it originally gave to Cambridge Analytica, the IP was then licensed back to SCL.

  Nix initially explained how this labyrinthine setup was to allow us to operate under the radar. Mercer’s rivals in the finance sector watched his every move, and if they knew that he had acquired a psychological warfare firm, others in the industry might figure out his next play—to develop sophisticated trend-forecasting tools—or poach key staff. We knew Bannon wanted to work on a project with Breitbart, but this was originally supposed to be a side project to satiate his personal fixations. Of course, this was all bullshit, and they wanted to build a political arsenal. I’m not even sure Mercer knew, at first, how effective Cambridge Analytica’s tools would be. He was like an investor in any startup—throwing money at smart, creative people who had an idea, in the hopes that it would turn into something valuable.

  What few people know, however, is the story of who became Cambridge Analytica’s very first target of disinformation. Back when Bannon and I first met, he had rejected going to a private club on Pall Mall, preferring to meet in Cambridge. Nix clocked this, realizing that his normal way of courting clients—by impressing them with fancy clubs, expensive wines, and fat cigars—wouldn’t work on Bannon, who saw himself as an intellectual, perfectly suited to the Gothic halls and sprawling greens of Cambridge. So Nix, like some kind of mythological shape-shifter transforming to lure his prey, made an instant decision to play to that.