In the course of home visits and focus groups in the autumn of 2013, we found Virginia contained a quintessential cross section of American life. We toured from Fairfax through the middle of the state, and then headed down to Norfolk and Virginia Beach, stopping in at local bars and mom-and-pop restaurants, where we welcomed the ambience as much as the sustenance. Indeed, you can learn a lot from the ways people eat, drink, and talk. Sweet tea and certain foods became pet obsessions after we discovered their cultural significance. If the American South was traditionally delineated by the old Mason-Dixon Line, which marked the border between slave owners and free states, a different divide cut through contemporary Virginia, where restaurants to the north served tea unsweetened and those to the south served it sweet. Here began the “real South,” the locals informed us—at the Sweet Tea Line, not just south of Mason-Dixon but farther south than Richmond too.
My favorite activities were to watch and listen to the Americans who agreed to let us spend time with them. I would sit on the sofa and eavesdrop on people talking about their day, or what they heard on the radio, or office politics. I would watch people watching Fox News and notice how furious they would get (which, because I came from a country without Fox News, was one of the most interesting things to see). It was a weird performance, as they would sit down waiting—and expecting—to be insulted by whatever the “elites” had done to them that day. They would flip on Fox and their rage became palpable. Sometimes I seemed to be witnessing a therapy session, like when people smash things in a rage room after a frustrating week. This was quite the juxtaposition to what I was normally used to seeing when my friends would happen to stumble upon Fox News. I distinctly remember Alistair Carmichael once referred to a shouty, red-faced Fox News correspondent as a “slapped arse.”
One couple told me about the thousands of dollars they owed for their insurance deductibles and how they would sometimes skimp on their prescriptions because they had to repair their car that month. They’d agreed to the interview because the $100 they received would get them closer to covering next month’s costs. But who did they blame for their insurance costs? Not their employer’s bad health plan or a lack of decent pay—they blamed Obamacare. They genuinely thought it was rolled out simply to help more undocumented workers come to America in a grand plan of liberal social engineering to keep the Democrats in power through more Democrat-leaning Latino voters, which in their minds made insurance and hospitals more expensive.
People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”
This was my longest exposure to Fox News, and all I could think about was how the network was conditioning people’s sense of identity into something that could be weaponized. Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic, where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion. It’s the same bias that makes people say things they later regret in a fit of anger—in the heat of the moment they are, in fact, thinking differently.
With their guards down, Fox’s audience is then told they are part of a group of “ordinary Americans.” This identity is hammered home over and over, which is why there are so many references to “us” and direct chatting to the audience by the moderators. The audience is reminded that if you are really an “ordinary American,” this is how you—i.e., “we”—think. This primes people for identity-motivated reasoning, which is a bias that essentially makes people accept or reject information based on how it serves to build or threaten group identity rather than on the merits of the content. This motivated reasoning is how Democrats and Republicans can watch the exact same newscast and reach the opposite conclusion. But I began to understand that Fox works because it grafts an identity onto the minds of viewers, who then begin to interpret a debate about ideas as an attack on their identity. This in turn triggers a reactance effect, whereby alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. The more Democrats criticized Fox’s bait, the more entrenched the audience’s views and the angrier they became. This is how, for example, viewers could reject criticism of Donald Trump for saying racist things: They internalized the critique as an attack on their own identity rather than that of the candidate. This has an insidious effect in which the more debate occurs, the more entrenched the audience becomes.
Doing this research, I also began to see socially and economically deprived white people in a different way. It was clear that part of what underpins racist and xenophobic sentiment is a feeling of being threatened, reinforced through constant and salient “warnings” from sources like Fox News. One of the problems I noticed with the topical political debates on American cable news channels is the lack of nuance in labeling voter constituencies. White voters, Latino voters, women voters, suburban voters, etc., are all frequently discussed as unidimensional and monolithic groups, when in fact the salient aspects of many voters’ identities do not actually reflect the labels that pollsters, analysts, or consultants use to describe them. And this in turn alienates certain people. If you’re a white man living in a trailer, for example, you’re probably going to get angry when you are shown people on TV who are insisting that white people are super-privileged in this country. If you grew up using an outhouse, you probably don’t have much tolerance for a big discussion about whether trans people should be able to use the toilets of their choice. If you’re lower middle class and you see a black person on welfare, it’s not surprising that your attitude would be “Well, what about my welfare?” if you live in a state that has continually cut your support. This is not to defend these views, but if we want to understand them, we have to remain open to other perspectives, even ugly ones.
As part of our early exploration of American culture, we looked at two areas we thought might be at play in this social discord. First we looked at whether a sense of social identity threat was fueling some of these views. The second area was related but slightly different. A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. This flawed logic extends into a perception that attention paid to other groups will ultimately mean less attention for people like them. Either way, minorities seemed to be “threats”—identity threats or threats to resources. Following this hypothesis of an underlying sense of threat, we wanted to see if we could mitigate some of these feelings, and we did so by trying to reduce the sense of threat. We would ask people in one study to imagine they were invincible superheroes who couldn’t be harmed or killed. We then asked them about types of people they ordinarily considered threatening—gays, immigrants, people of other races—and found that they had a more muted response to those “threatening” stimuli. If you are invincible, nothing can threaten you, not even the gays. This was fascinating for me and the team, as we were unpacking possible ways to mitigate underlying factors for racial tension. With each experiment, we learned more about how to manipulate outcomes according to people’s innermost traits.
Our work in Virginia yielded promising results. We showed that there were relationships between personality traits and political outcomes, and that we could not only predict certain behaviors but also shift attitudes by framing the language of messages to correspond to psychometric profiles. We knew that even though the data sets we used were pretty decent in this little sandbox of pilots, they were still woefully inadequate for discerning all the nuances of personality and identity. In order to truly re-create society in silico, we would need to find even more complete data—way more data. But that was a problem to be solved in the future.
Nix gave us a week to write a report that would normally have taken two months to do. He was anxious to get the ball rolling, because he knew what was at stake. Bannon had told him that Mercer might invest up to $20 million. For a niche firm like SCL, which had an annual budget in the range of $7 million to $10 million, this would be a game-changing amount of money.
After pulling late nights and working through the weekend, we sent the report to Bannon the following Monday, and he immediately understood the possibilities of what we could accomplish. He was fully on board. In fact, he called the SCL office after reading the report and was almost giddy. “This is so great, guys,” he kept saying.
Now we just had to persuade Robert Mercer.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS after this, one evening in late November 2013, Nix called me at home. “Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re flying to New York tomorrow.” He, Tadas Jucikas, and I were going to present our findings to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.
Nix flew out first thing in the morning, but for some reason he’d booked Jucikas and me on a later flight. We landed at JFK around four in the afternoon, with our meeting scheduled to start at five. As we stood in line at U.S. customs, my phone rang. It was Nix. “Where the fuck are you?” he demanded.
“We just got off the plane,” I told him.
“Well, you’re late,” he snapped. “You’d better hurry up and get here.”
“I can’t just wave myself through passport control!” I said, exasperated. As we squabbled on the phone, others in the queue turned their heads. We continued arguing until a customs official barked at me to get off the phone. And that wasn’t the end of it. Nix called me repeatedly—as we got in the car, when we arrived at the hotel, and as I changed clothes to come to the meeting. This was typical Nix, planning poorly and expecting me to fix everything. Irritated, I decided to put my phone on silent and take my time getting ready, mostly just to vex him. Jucikas and I took a cab to the meeting, which was at Rebekah Mercer’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Rebekah and her husband, a French financier named Sylvain Mirochnikoff, had bought six apartments at the Heritage at Trump Place, on Riverside Boulevard, combining them into one gigantic seventeen-bedroom home. The place took up most of the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth floors, with spectacular views up and down the Hudson, dotted with all the lights of New York.
But it was also tacky, as Rebekah had decorated it with random artsy-craftsy touches: ceramic figurines, throw pillows, holiday decorations. In the living room, she had a magnificent grand piano, and on top of it was a clusterfuck of knickknacks and framed family photos.
Rebekah was an interesting case. She had studied biology and mathematics at Stanford and earned a master’s in operations research and engineering economic systems. She had then followed her father into trading at Renaissance Technologies but left when she began homeschooling her children. In 2006, she and her sisters bought a bakery in Manhattan, so her life became primarily about kids and chocolate chunk cookies. She had a super-perky air about her, like some kind of right-wing cheerleader. And because she had so much money to give, she was an influential person in GOP circles. Unlike more cynical Republican Party operatives, she had what Mark Block called “TB”—she was a true believer in these conservative crusades.
I walked into the living room and saw Rebekah sitting on a loveseat with Nix. The two of them were chatting and laughing, Nix turning on the charm. The room was packed with people—Bob Mercer, Bannon, Block, a couple of old men from the pro-Brexit right-wing U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), and a collection of guys in suits who I assumed were lawyers or corporate advisers. Several other Mercers were also there, including Bob’s wife, Diana, their daughter Jennifer, and a few grandchildren. This was a family affair.
Mercer was the antithesis of his daughters, who were gaudy and garrulous. He rarely looked at anyone and mostly just listened. He wore a plain gray suit, even though we were at his daughter’s house for dinner. Most of the talking was done by his daughters or his entourage. He was intimidating, deeply serious, and almost entirely nonverbal. When he did speak, his tone was flat. He asked only questions related to very technical aspects of our work and always wanted me to give specific statistics.
When the time came, Nix stood up and gave a short speech about SCL’s pedigree, our work for the military, and how the firm didn’t normally indulge private clients as we were now (a lie) but how Mercer’s persistence at chasing him had worn him down. I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Nix then introduced me and started describing the project wholly incorrectly. He clearly had not read the long report and so just started making up findings. I knew Mercer would see right through his bullshit, so I interrupted to describe what we’d done in Virginia. Nix glared at me as he sat down beside Rebekah. In discussing the project, I added some of the more colorful details to draw the Mercers in. When I mentioned Kombucha Lady, describing her as an evangelical Christian who loved yoga and organic foods, Rebekah blurted, “That’s so me! Finally, someone understands us!”
I also talked about SCL’s projects in other regions—the Middle East, North Africa, the Caribbean. When I got to the Trinidad project, I could see Bannon nodding his head as I described the idea of replicating society in silico. It also got Bob Mercer’s attention, because as an engineer he was especially interested in this part. After I started at SCL, I had realized that the information propagation R&D projects that DARPA was funding were just cultural trend forecasting by another name. Harvesting social media data to profile users with an algorithm was just the beginning. Once their behavioral attributes were inferred, simulations could be run to map out how they would communicate and interact with one another at scale. This brought to mind experiments from the 1990s in a niche field of sociology called “artificial societies,” which involved attempts by crude multi-agent systems to “grow” societies in silico. I could remember as a teenager reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where scientists used large data sets about societies to create the field of “psychohistory,” which allowed them to not only predict the future but also control it.
Mercer had involved people from his company Renaissance Technologies in the original scoping of SCL, and, given that Nix was so focused on money and a hedge fund was part of the early stages of this project, everyone was under the impression that this was going to become a commercial venture. To put it crudely, if we could copy everyone’s data profiles and replicate society in a computer—like the game The Sims but with real people’s data—we could simulate and forecast what would happen in society and the market. This seemed to be Mercer’s goal. If we created this artificial society, we thought we would be on the threshold of creating one of the most powerful market intelligence tools in the world. We would be venturing into a new field—cultural finance and trend forecasting for hedge funds.
Mercer, the computer engineer turned social engineer, wanted to re-factor society and optimize its people. One of his hobbies is building model train sets, and I got the feeling that he thought he could, in effect, get us to build him a model society for him to tinker with until it was perfect. By taking a leap at quantifying many of the intrinsic aspects of human behavior and cultural interaction, Mercer eventually realized that he could have at his disposal the Uber of information warfare. And, like Uber, which decimated the hundred-year-old taxi industry with a single app, his venture was about to do the same with democracy.
Bannon’s goal was fundamentally different. He was no traditional Republican. In fact, he hated Mitt Romney–style Republicans for what he saw as their vapid capitalism. He loathed Ayn Rand, because she objectified people into commodities. He would talk about how an economy needed a higher purpose and sometimes referred to himself as a Marxist, less out of ideology than to make a point—that Marx talked about humans fulfilling a purpose. He claimed to believe in dharma, a tenet of Hinduism and Buddhism that has to do with order in the universe and proper, harmonious ways of living. He felt his mission was to find America’s purpose. In his mind, the time was right for a revolution: He saw several signals from the financial crisis and a decaying trust in institutions that foretold of a great reckoning looming on the horizon. Bannon’s quest was quasi-religious, with him assuming the role of messiah.
So, like Mercer, Bannon hated “big government,” but for his own reason—because he saw the administrative state replacing the roles played by tradition and culture. For him, the EU was a chief offender, a sterile bureaucracy replacing tradition in the extreme—leaving Europe to become an economic marketplace devoid of meaning. The Western world seemed to Bannon as if it were losing its way by abandoning its cultural traditions for meaningless consumerism and a faceless state. For Bannon, this was a full-on culture war. As a self-anointed prophet, Bannon wanted a tool to peer into the future of our societies. And with what Bannon called Facebook’s God’s-eye view of each and every citizen, he could work to find the dharma for every American. In this way our research became almost spiritual for him.
Nix, Bannon, and Mercer were all fascinated with Palantir, Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm, whose name comes from the crystal ball, or all-seeing eye, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. At the time, it seemed to me that these men wanted to create their own private Palantir by investing in SCL. Imagine the possibilities for an investor like Mercer: Predict the future of what people will buy and not buy, in order to make more money. If you can see a crash coming, you have the all-seeing orb for society: You might make billions overnight.
When I finished, Rebekah invited everyone into the dining room. The kitchen staff brought out plates of filet mignon with a delicate garnish, but, knowing that I didn’t eat meat, Rebekah had asked the chef to prepare a special dish for me. It turned out to be grilled cheese sandwiches—I suppose at least she’d tried. She reached over to my plate to grab one and, after taking a bite, sighed with contentment. “I actually just asked for these because I wanted one,” she confided.
“You know,” she said, “I’m so glad that someone like you is giving us a chance. We need more of your kind of people.”
“Oh, what do you mean?” I asked innocently. Of course, I knew exactly what she meant, but I wanted her to say it out loud.
“The gays—who I love, by the way!”
I pondered how she squared the mental gymnastics of both loving the gays and also supporting causes to oppress them. But then again, I’ve been to many dinners where people talk about how much they love animals as they tear into a steak.
Rebekah wanted to entice more LGBT people into the Republican ranks, believing it would strengthen the party. She then said she loved my jacket and suggested we go shopping together sometime. Rebekah was so awkward, and so expertly manipulated by Nix, I almost felt sorry for her. But not quite.
At the end of the meal, Bob asked everyone to leave except for Nix, Rebekah, and the lawyers. He had made the decision to invest—somewhere between $15 million and $20 million of his own money. “We’ll create an actual palantír,” Nix said. “We’ll literally be able to see what’s going to happen.”
WITH UP TO $20 million in the bag, Nix was in a giddy mood. The night after our meeting, he took Jucikas and me to a lavish dinner at Eleven Madison Park, a Michelin-star venue with vaulted ceilings. He ostentatiously flipped through the wine list, then directed the waiter to bring us the Château Lafite Rothschild—a $2,000 bottle of wine.
“Get whatever you like,” he said, waving his arm grandly. This was a pleasant surprise, because, despite his wealth, Nix was cheap and complained about even the smallest expenses, such as office supplies. He once rejected an expense claim because someone bought “too many” highlighters, saying, “You don’t need more than one.” But on this evening he ordered what seemed like dozens of dishes, an Arthurian feast. He was flush with his own magnificence.
The waiter brought the wine, and no sooner had he filled our glasses than Nix flailed his arm in conversation and knocked the bottle off the table. Hundred-dollar droplets spewed everywhere, and before the waiter even had a chance to whip off his arm towel and clean it up, Nix exclaimed, “Bring us another!” I must have looked at him agape, because he winked and said, “When you have $20 million, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
The night turned into a full-on bacchanalia. Somehow a couple of women in tight skirts materialized, to the evident shock of other diners. “Chris, do you want one?” he asked me, until I reminded him that I was not into women, as if anyone needed reminding, and he blurted, “Oh, do you want me to find you a bum boy?” I didn’t know how to respond, but Nix just kept talking. He then told me a story about his time at Eton and what posh boys apparently do for fun. The whole scene was beyond mortifying, and it just kept getting worse.
At some point, the restaurant’s management had to figure out what to do with us. Our bill by now was in the tens of thousands of dollars, so they couldn’t just throw us out before we’d paid. Jucikas and Nix were too far gone to care, but I was sitting there watching everyone watch us. Then, in what was obviously a coordinated move, a dozen waiters suddenly fanned out in the room, whispering to the guests at the other tables. All the guests rose from their tables as one and walked into an adjoining dining room while the waiters picked up half-eaten entrees and bottles of wine and deftly resettled everyone away from the ruckus we were causing.
I’ve come to think that there was something darkly prescient about that night. Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon’s animating ideology. Before catalyzing America’s dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos throughout society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on “truth” influenced Bannon and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes. “It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
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.
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.
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, Oregon, 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.
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 actually 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.
He told Bannon that while SCL had London offices, we were based primarily out of Cambridge because of our close partnership with the university. This was a total falsehood, made up on the fly. But for Nix, truth was whatever he deemed true in the moment. As soon as he’d said we had a Cambridge office, he started referring to it all the time, urging Bannon to stop by.
“Alexander, we don’t have a Cambridge office,” I said, exasperated with his insanity. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh, yes we do, it’s just not open at the moment,” he said.
A couple of days before Bannon’s next visit to the U.K., Nix had the London office staff set up a fake office in Cambridge, complete with rented furniture and computers. On the day Bannon was scheduled to arrive, he said, “Okay, everyone, we’re working out of our Cambridge office today!” And we all packed up to go out there and work. Nix also hired a handful of temps and several scantily clad young women to staff the would-be office for Bannon’s visit.
The whole thing felt ludicrous. Gettleson and I messaged each other, sharing links about Potemkin villages, the fake Russian towns set up in old tsarist Russia to woo Catherine the Great when she visited in 1783. We christened the office the Potemkin Site and made relentless fun of Nix for coming up with such a stupid idea. But when I walked around the fake office with Bannon, two months after I first met him in a Cambridge hotel, I could see the light in his eyes. He was buying it and loving every moment of it. Fortunately, he never noticed that some of the computers weren’t actually plugged in or that some of the hired girls didn’t speak English.
Nix set up the Potemkin Site every time Bannon came to town. Bannon never caught on that it was fake. Or if he did, he didn’t mind. It fit the vision. And when it came time to name the new entity the Mercers were funding, Bannon chose Cambridge Analytica—because that was where we were based, he said. So Cambridge Analytica’s first target was Bannon himself. The Potemkin Site perfectly encapsulated the heart and soul of Cambridge Analytica, which perfected the art of showing people what they want to see, whether real or not, to mold their behavior—a strategy that was so effective, even a man like Steve Bannon could be fooled by someone like Alexander Nix.