Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right

"Reveals a political trend that threatens both our form of government and our species." - Timothy Snyder, author of ON TYRANNY

"Riveting.... Want to understand how so many Americans turned against truth? Read this book." Nancy Maclean, author of DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. They called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.

In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

Author: Anne Nelson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 05/11/2021
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781635575828

About the Author
Anne Nelson has received a Livingston Award for her journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research, and a Bellagio Fellowship for her research on the social impact of digital media. A graduate of Yale University, she began her career as a journalist in the U.S and abroad. She won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing on the conflict in Central America, which she covered for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the BBC. She has taught at Columbia University for over two decades, first at the School of Journalism and then at the School of International and Public Affairs. Her previous books include Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. A native of Oklahoma, she lives in New York City.