In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, three young men decided to start the Council for National Policy in order to take back the country for God–and themselves. They joined forces with an army of clergy, big donors, and media moguls in order to take back America. This “shadow network,” as the journalist Anne Nelson calls it is the secretive, but pervasive force that has overtaken the GOP and infiltrated every level and every corner of this country’s politics. Interview: Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network, and faculty at Columbia University

Interviewee: 

Anne Nelson has written extensively on media, conflict, and human rights. She was a war correspondent in Latin America, and reported from Eastern Europe and Asia, with work appearing in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, BBC, CBC, NPR and PBS. Her writing has won six awards, including the Livingston Award for international reporting. Nelson is a widely-produced playwright and screenwriter. Her 2001 play, “The Guys,” deals with the post-9/11 experience and has been produced throughout the United States and in fourteen countries. Her screenplay became a 2002 feature film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, which received the National Board of Review award for Excellence in Filmmaking. Her play “Savages,” based on the true story of war crimes during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, was produced off-Broadway in 2006 and published by Dramatists Play Service. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for work on media and Nazi Germany.

Suggested Reading: 

Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (Bloomsbury 2019)

Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press 2020)