Shadow network : media, money, and the secret hub of the radical right / Anne Nelson

Dramatis personae
Prologue
In the beginning: Texas
The birth of the CNP: Washington
Lords of the air: the CNP's media empire
The news hole in the heart of America
Money people
Fishers of men: electoral stratagems
Ideology 101: the CNP's campus partners
Koch, DeVos, Soros: donors, politics, and pastors
The Obama challenge
Data wars
The art of the deal: New York, June 21, 2016
"The Miracle"
Midterms
"Democracy in America"
Epilogue

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. These men and women 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 behind the scenes. 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 Mike Pence, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos family 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 American 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