A new study confirms the idea that you can inoculate an audience against further lies by teaching them about misinformation. By explaining false balance to an audience, like the history of tobacco’s “fake experts,” the audience is less likely to fall for the various tricks deniers will use to turn the public against real experts.
For a great (and timely) example of fake experts, we have the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s letter urging Trump to abandon the Paris agreement. It’s signed by representatives of forty free-market groups, which to the untrained eye might appear to be credible experts. But to those savvy in the ways of fossil-fuel front groups, these are no different than the “20,679 Physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating’” example from when Big Tobacco misled the public. In fact, the inoculation study used this example to show how fake experts have long been used to convince the public to act against its own best interest.
Far from being unbiased and independent experts, the group of forty signatories may as well have signed “Sincerely, The Kochs.” But the Kochs aren’t the only ones who deserve our attention, since there are other big names at play in this world like Trump funders and string pullers, the Mercers. (Interesting side note, Mercer’s company is being sued by a former employee who was fired for comments critical of Mercer’s politics, particularly regarding comments about Bob Mercer expressing his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.)
Specifically there are two relatively obscure funders behind CEI that were recently revealed in documents published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. In an in-depth investigation rising out of hacked internal documents, the Journal-Sentinel looks at the (relatively successful) efforts of the Lynn and Harry Bradley Foundation to grow beyond Wisconsin and into a national, Koch-like network.
The Bradley Foundation is quite similar to the Kochs. Like the Kochs’ father, Harry Bradley was an OG of the John Birch Society (which, like their ideological brother Bob Mercer, was also opposed to the Civil Rights Act.) Like the Kochs and Mercers, the Bradley foundation supports a long list of right-wing groups, as well as a number of respectable, Milwaukee-based civic institutions. But among the listings for children’s theaters and orchestra donations are hefty sums to groups like CEI.
We know this because one of the documents leaked is a 2014 grant funding proposal where CEI asks Bradley to renew its giving. In it, CEI brags about their close work with other Bradley-supported groups, as well as listing out some of CEI’s other funders- the Koch and Scaife Foundations, as well as Exxon Mobil- who has claimed they stopped funding deniers like CEI years go, meaning either that’s not true, or CEI is listing defunct support.
Getting a special shout-out from CEI is Barre Seid, who has anonymously “been among [CEI’s] biggest supporters.” Seid’s alleged anonymous giving to other groups, like Heartland has been touched on elsewhere in leaked documents, so this is a thread interested parties might want to start tugging.
Another interesting tidbit? When describing themselves in public, groups like CEI are always careful to describe themselves as “free-market” groups, not political ones. This distinction is important, since their tax-deductible 501c(3) status prohibits partisan political activity.
But apparently CEI is willing to let the “free-market” fig leaf fall behind closed doors, as the document refers to CEI’s Cooler Heads Coalition, chaired by scorned Trump advisor Myron Ebell. The document describes Ebell’s work as bringing together “scholars and activists from almost every major right-of-center organization in Washington, D.C.”
This then brings us back to the coalition letter, led by Ebell and signed by “Forty Free-Market Groups.” Are all these groups and their legally non-partisan remit the same “right-of-center” groups CEI brags about to its funder?
Perhaps someone should give the IRS a heads up, and we’ll c(3) what they say...
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