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Engel: What is data?
Like, data is just information,
and we pray constantly for wisdom.
Well, what is wisdom?
Wisdom is just having more information than another person.
The anchoring verse that was the marker
for what it is we were doing was Nehemiah 1:1-4.
"Tell me about my people, and tell me about my city."
So, Nehemiah -- they used data back then
to apply to the certain people.
What they did is they knew sort of this macro meta data
that said, "Hey, man, things are really messed up,
and the people, they're -- I mean, they're jacked up.
Like, things are not going well.
We measured prayer requests.
Call it crazy, but it was like
we're sitting on mounds of information
that could help us steward our people.
So, Nehemiah, now that he got this information,
what does he do?
He modeled praying, he modeled fasting,
he modeled mourning, and he modeled weeping,
but he also ended up doing something based upon the data.
I'm also hopeful
to have Americans working again
by that Easter, that beautiful Easter day.
But rest assured, every decision we make is grounded
solely in the health, safety, and well-being of our citizens.
Engel: Church has the one thing that most companies
are absolutely desperate for, which is relationship.
We own the relationship space.
Like, we own it.
That's the church.
Regular listeners will know that
the UK Digital Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee,
which I advise, has been investigating fake news --
what it is, where it comes from,
and how big-data companies are involved.
But after the revelations about Cambridge Analytica,
the investigation has dramatically widened.
Reporter #2: A data-analytics firm that worked
on the winning election campaign of Donald Trump
was involved in one of Facebook's
biggest-ever data breaches.
I'm Charles Kriel. I was the special advisor
to the House of Commons Select Committee in the UK
that was investigating data and Facebook
and Cambridge Analytica.
It was really exciting for me
because I'm half from Alabama and half from Corning,
so that doesn't exactly scream "parliamentary adviser."
This was the first real wade into this territory,
especially by a government body
or parliamentary investigatory committee,
so to be able to help drive it as the adviser
was really exciting for me.
Collins: Welcome to this further evidence session
of the Digital, Culture,
Media, and Sport Select Committee.
Dr. Kriel, would you like to start us off?
Thank you very much,
and thanks for having me along today.
I had written an article about Cambridge Analytica
for NATO's Center of Excellence journal.
Committee was due to go and question
a number of American witnesses,
including people from YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook,
so I came in and testified.
The more sophisticated operations
of, uh, companies like Cambridge Analytica
will also use
five-factor personality profiling on individuals
and then group those individuals
and target them specifically,
so it's to look for people who are vulnerable
to certain types of messaging.
What I'll do is I'll shoot questions to the members
when we're in committee, and those questions
will be questions to ask the witnesses.
If someone came along, said, "I want to --
I want to sort of -- I want to run a campaign
that is -- that is --
which is going to be particularly relevant
to people that are thinking of voting Republican
but have very strong religious beliefs,"
would you say, "We actually can create that campaign for you
because we not only understand people's political motivations,
but we also can identify people
with, uh, strong religious beliefs"?
Hypothetically, it would be possible
if you had enough data, say, on, you know,
evangelical Christians in America
to have a look at that audience
and see if there's a correlation
between that and some political agenda.
Obviously, there are very large church organizations
and religious organizations
that might have access to these types of data.
Yeah. Could you say...
Did you notice
what Nix said at the time about evangelicals?
I didn't notice at all what Nix said about evangelicals
when he said it.
That went unnoticed by everybody else.
Why don't you tell people who you are
and what it is that you do?
Okay, I will. First of all,
if you wonder why I'm drawing -- drawing in the baby's room,
it's the only room that we have any room in.
Um, so that's the way that goes.
Um, my name's Charles Kriel, and I'm the special adviser
to the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Fake News.
Um, a lot of other things, too,
but that's one of many things that I do.
I'm a specialist in digital media, as you can see.
This is something a lot of people don't know
about what brought this iteration
of Cambridge Analytica down
and how Alexander Nix ended up answering to parliament.
How did you do that?
Um, well, Channel 4 hadn't done their sting yet,
The question was
how do we get him to come in and testify?
'Cause there was beginning to be some scrutiny on him,
and we figured he probably wouldn't.
So I drafted a letter that was very complimentary.
"Oh, Mr. Nix, you are so very, very great."
It's fair to say that there'll be many people
who have given their data to you
who are not aware that their data
is then being used in this way,
used to support other campaigns.
I think the first answer is that
this is not particularly intrusive data.
This is not like someone's given up their health data
or their financial data or their -- their private data.
You -- You mentioned that you have 4,000 or 5,00 data points
on everybody adult in the United States,
i.e. the entire voting population.
Does every adult in the United States
know that you have 4,000 or 5,000 data points on them?
"Would you please come in and sit?"
What kind of people
usually respond to that kind of, uh, invitation?
Narcissists.
We're trying to make sure that voters receive messages
on the issues and policies that they care most about,
and we're trying to make sure that they're not bombarded
with -- with -- with irrelevant materials.
And that can only be good.
That can only be good for politics
and indeed of democracy.
It can be good to the wider realms
of communication and advertising.
How would you target millions of people like me if you --
if -- because when we talk about elections or big campaigns,
that's effectively what we're -- we're talking about.
It's not just the microtargeting of a very small number of people
based on age or geographical location,
but -- but a whole range of people
who hold different views.
Here's what Cambridge Analytical would say.
With 10 likes, I can predict your behavior
better than your coworker, but 300 likes,
I can predict your behavior better than your wife.
But what they're really saying there is
by algorithmically observing your behavior,
I can learn to understand you
and figure out how to push you to extremes.
So if you're somebody who is politically in the middle,
it's really very unlikely
that I'm going to turn you into an extreme leftist.
But if you were somebody who was on the left
and pretty far out in the margins of the left,
I can probably push you to extremism.
I can get you so wound up and so angry
because I know what you're afraid of
or I know what pushes your buttons,
and I can do the same with the right.
What's new is I can micro-target to scale,
so I can do this to millions of people at a time now
and manipulate a population to turn out to vote
for the person I want them to vote for
or notto turn out to vote
for the person I don'twant them to vote for.
Just hold that point.
I just got a quick...
Great, great.
My name is Sven Hughes.
I used to work as head of politics for SCL,
the precursor to Cambridge Analytica.
The big data
is something that can be over time regulated,
and the commercial sector
will -- will kind of clean up its act.
There's actually a much,
much more serious story that sits behind this,
which has to do with election financing,
the kind of companies that put into power
and take out of power people on demand for a price.
It's completely unregulated.
Pretty much the -- no one knows about it,
and the people who -- who do know about it
have a tendency to end up dead in Africa.
With what you know,
do you worry?
Do you -- Have you got scared in the process?
I've certainly warned one of my team,
who was my deputy at the time,
when I left SCL for ethical reasons.
I warned Dan Muresan,
"Don't mistake that the operation security on this
is not good enough.
I'm pleading with you
to step out of this company now with me."
He made his own choice, and I said, "No."
And the next thing I heard, he was killed on an SCL --
he died on an SCL contract in Kenya some time later.
And this is who Chris Wiley
was talking about being his predecessor.
Yeah. So I was -- I was in that job,
then Dan Muresan, who's dead,
and then Chris Wiley, who obviously is now
a household name.
A deal went sour, and...
again, this is what I've been told,
so I'm not saying this as a matter of fact.
But people suspected
that he was poisoned in his hotel room.
I also heard that the police got bribed
to not enter the hotel room for 24 hours.
The period I'm interested in is 2009 to 2011,
when you were working on elections
in St. Kitts and Nevis, uh, Dominica,
St. Vincent in the Grenadines.
Well, I think, as I said last time,
we don't generally like to talk about specific clients.
I've turned down so much work.
I turned down work for Libya, Syria.
I had someone sitting in front of me offering me a stake
in a diamond mine if I put them into power,
all these sort of things.
You know, the money you can make by being unethical
is so extraordinary.
Disinformation is one of the biggest threats
to democracy.
With a committee,
I really hope to make a difference for the future.
Everything changed the day Chris Vickery came in
and gave testimony, which is really funny
because we had less people come to that testimony
than any session we had done at all.
Collins: Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome Chris Vickery.
We're delighted that you've been able to join us, Chris.
You've come all the way from the West Coast
to be here in London today.
You've got hackers,
and then you've got what Chris does.
And hackers will break into things and take data,
and they'll call the company and go, "We've got your data,
and if you give us so much money,
then you can have your data back."
Chris Vickery does something entirely different.
He finds data that is exposed,
and then he lets the company know
and he offers his services
to help them prevent that thing in the future.
So as he tells it,
one night, he was hammering around on the Internet
and sort of listening in the background to information
about the Cambridge Analytica investigation,
and so he goes looking.
What is happening is this database of truth exists
with all the data.
He finds a vast amount of cloud data open to anybody
who registered for an account.
The database of truth, which is starting to sound
a bit like a science-fiction novel, um,
that's -- is that a sort of constantly evolving organism,
which is get -- get sort of, you know, richer and richer
depending on what -- what's put into it?
The database of truth is fed --
the foundation, apparently,
according to what's written in there,
is the Republican database
called Data Trust Voter Vault.
There's a company named Data Trust
that is very close
to the Republican Party, the GOP in America,
so much to the point that I would say
they could be considered the same entity.
And then they add state voter files to,
I assume, corroborate what's in the RNC database.
Then they add consumer purchasable data,
such as from Experian.
You know, it's limitless what other companies
would sell you data similar to Experian.
Then they add lists that the candidate --
the campaign itself gives to them.
Chris finds this data.
He, um, downloads it.
Uh, he makes, uh, the authorities aware of it,
the FBI aware of it.
On this hard drive right here
that I'm now delivering to you guys in the committee,
uh, you will find all of that.
After the session was over, he gives us the hard drive,
and me and some of the MPs
are standing around looking at each other.
And they're going like, "I don't want to carry it out."
You know, like, "I don't want to carry it out, either."
Nobody wanted to --
Nobody wanted to walk down the halls with it.
It was really quite frightening.
Um...so they gave it to me.
There's a reason that not many people have come forward
and spoken about Cambridge Analytica.
I'm in Paddington Station,
and I've got this hard drive on me.
And I'm -- I'm just terrified with it.
I don't know what I'm doing carrying it on my back,
trying to ferry it home somewhere safe
to get it to people to -- to examine.
I was sure that there must be something on this drive
that would lead us to being able to nail Cambridge Analytica.
So I've just had a big interchange
back and forth with [bleep]
They've been working with us supposedly for the past month.
I'm doing this hard-drive investigation.
And it turns out they've got one developer
less than half time working on this.
That's just not gonna do,
and what's gonna happen is this investigation
will end up getting lost to history.
It's this alignment of very, very wealthy interests
with political interests who do not have democracy at heart,
who do not have people, um, in their heart and in their minds,
um, and -- and how political systems can be manipulated.
These things are aligning with one another.
This story is going to be bigger than Donald Trump.
It's gonna be bigger than Brexit.
It's been another big week in the news.
The Select Committee are releasing our final report
on fake news and disinformation,
but really, it's about something much bigger.
Look, I'm sorry if members of this committee are unhappy
with the outcome of the referendum.
I'm sorry if members of this committee are unhappy with...
That's not -- I-I didn't say --
...Donald Trump being president of the United States.
Cambridge Analytica is by no means alone in being a provider
of immoral, irresponsible, unethical services
to clandestine hidden hands that pay big money for them,
and because political parties
aren't ever gonna take those people on
because they rely on them to get into power next time.
They're not gonna take on the very industry that they can --
that can get them into power, and once they're in power,
they're not gonna regulate against that industry
because it got them into power in the first place.
And if they turned against the industry,
they'd be taken out of power.
The second session was a disaster.
Nix came off as a victim. It was a car crash.
And the fact is, there's no evidence...Mr. Nix, yes, there is.
...to support your position.
What you're doing now is building a conspiracy.
So you have this sort of Faustian game and relationship
that's going on behind closed doors,
away from the public's gaze at the moment.
And everyone's talking about big data.
Sod big data.
It's like a year and a half of work
and calling Mark Zuckerberg
and -- and -- and pushing and pushing
and -- and writing on this report for months,
and it just disappears.
This had been a year and a half of all of our lives,
an unbelievable amount of work,
people staying up all night long,
months on end doing the writing,
and it just disappeared into a media black hole.
It was like lying in bed in the middle of the night.
"Have I wasted the last couple of years of my life?"
It just felt like everyone was gonna get away with it,
and there wasn't a thing I could do.
What was slam-dunk on the drive, though,
was there was a lot of information from America.
There were a lot of records from America,
um, and it related to voting and voters.
And in fact, there was a part
of the Republican National Committee's
database on that drive.
Now, the next big election coming up
is the 2020 election in the United States.
This is Kat. Please leave a message.
Hey, Kat, it's me.
I think we have to go to America.
Whether it has to do with religion,
our evangelicals are here tonight,
and they're all over the place.
As congressional testimony over Ukraine
started to heat up a few weeks ago,
we learned that President Trump took time out to pray.
Oh, this God country.
A group prayer in the West Wing with some high-profile guests,
as tweeted by televangelist Paula White-Cain.
Now, a photo showed Trump standing, eyes closed,
nearly two dozen well-known evangelical leaders
with their heads bowed and hands on his arms and shoulders.
What I'm trying to draw out is I just think we've been --
This whole story has been handled in the wrong way,
that we're talking to the right people,
but we're talking to them about the wrong things.
What's happening with Trump and what's happening with Brexit
is just more evidence that.
Our first stop in America was Sean Eib with Graphika...
...who'd been analyzing
the evidence on Chris Vickery's hard drive.
I had also started looking at the United in Purpose
data breach, which was the, uh, 100 -- I believe
191 million voter records
that were found exposed also by Chris Vickery.
United in Purpose started off its life
as an evangelical group.
They made a coalition of pastors that were simply doing
a "get out the vote drive"
within their evangelical churches
and stuff like that to kind of build out their voter database.
By the time Vickery found it,
they had grown 191 million voter records.
That's essentially every voting-age adult in the US.
Are these records the same as the GOP data addressed?
This is supposed to be the GOP's central location
for all their data.
If you look at their total number of profiles,
they're pretty much neck and neck.
Well, you win it by five million,
youwin it by five million.
You're not acknowledging a connection,
but it seems like you guys
sure do seem to get records all at the same time.
It does not seem like it makes a whole lot of sense
that an evangelical group would need
191 million profiles.
There aren't that many evangelicals in America.
I think it's somewhere a quarter of Americans
identify as evangelical, which would be like 75 million.
So there's definitely a lot of people that are in there
that didn't sign up for it.
Vickery also found 28 million records
that were highly enriched profiles.
Believe that was the one he found himself in,
where it had like 60 different issues,
and it was predicting people's stance on that issue.
And for the -- for the layman, what does "enriched" mean?
So enriched -- they have added in extra data saying,
"Okay, this is a likely voter.
This is a likely swing voter.
This person is likely to vote based on this issue."
You were a kind of one-position voter based on abortion.
Doesn't matter what other policies you support,
all those you can kind of ignore.
This is the one that's important,
So it's a pretty deep level of, like, understanding
of of what can what you can expect a person to do
when they go to cast their vote.
That's interesting because there's supposed to be
a separation of church and state.
Oh, yeah. No, they're supposed to be.
Um, it doesn't seem like it works all the time.
Okay, he's coming.
How's the sound quality?
Conservative churches in America are often used to spread
a number of clearly partisan political messages.
They're used to mobilize and drive voter participation,
so when I went to meetings of the pastor networks
like Watchmen on the Walls and Church United,
what I saw was these national leaders
who were focused on, uh, partisan political gain.
They were going around the country to swing districts,
often in advance of key elections,
and then working to shape the views of pastors
and then encouraging these pastors
to become politically engaged
in what were clearly partisan ways.
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Every point of data moves you one step closer
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That could be people battling substance use
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Maximize your capacity to change lives
by leveraging insights from big data
so you can understand the people you want to serve,
reach them earlier,
and turn their needs into a journey towards growth.
That's outrageous.
Is that on the market at the moment?
They took it down.
That's outrageous. Basically, the same --
This is Cambridge Analytica by another name.
God help us. We're going to hell in a handcart. God help us.
So this guy Brent, like overnight,
he sends me a thousand messages from Melbourne.
Hey, Brent, welcome to New York.
I wake up in the morning,
and my notifications are completely full.
Usually, because I have to deal with
a lot of conspiracy theorists,
one of the way that I ways that I filter them out
is if they can't be brief,
so my immediate thought about Brent was,
"Oh, God, it's another conspiracy theorist."
But then I started going through the evidence,
and it was extraordinary.
When it got to the point where, um...
Cambridge America was bankrupt,
I followed up on a kind of thought experiment, really,
which was go through the creditors
in the -- in the Cambridge Analytica bankruptcy case.
Now, the creditor/client --
because that's the assumption, that the creditor is a client --
was Philanthropy Roundtable
that's funded by the Koch brothers...
...and they set up Culture of Freedom Initiative.
They're funding projects to do with families,
marriage, and church attendance,
and one of the key projects
that they were promoting over the last few years
is their Smart Ministries initiative.
Spahn: No matter your experience, no matter race,
gender, or economic status, there's just hurt.
Like, this world hurts us.
There's a world of difference between peace and freedom
that only the spirit offers
and relief, which we can find in a bunch of different ways.
I got invited through my roommate,
and I was very hesitant and skeptical.
It's like my brain has been rewired
to see people and situations differently.
To have these relationships now has changed my life.
I would like to thank the Culture of Freedom initiative.
Without you, I would not be where I am.
Smart ministries or -- or data churches --
or -- what does that mean, really?
There's a push within what I would describe
as prosperity Christianity.
The Culture Freedom Initiative set up a contract
and a church ad company in Boulder, Colorado, called Gloo,
and they set up a platform,
which is a microtargeting plan.
And they're marketing that very aggressively to churches
as a way of expanding their outreach to new worshippers
to increase the size of the congregation,
and it's also the means by which the congregation is...
And so they discuss openly
in some of the background documentation
that if you target people
who are suffering from relationship stress,
then you're more likely to get the kind of flow
on attendance at church,
and -- and they're more likely to donate twice as much
as existing church members.
And so the data is...
The concern for me is if you put these techniques
in a religious environment of any kind,
a religious group of any kind,
an audience that is ripe for information, um, influence,
what they are doing there is trying to, um, create
an unknowing universe of control
in which vulnerable people are situated,
and this group of people who have an agenda
are talking, saying, "We know what's right for you,
so what we'll do is create the context
that when you're at your most vulnerable,
we're there for you."
Absolutely, without question,
those are the same techniques that ISIS, Al-Qaeda,
the Taliban have been using
and we've been fighting for many -- for many years,
which is the -- the parasite, if you like,
of the infrastructure of a religion
to put in a malevolent message.
Um, yes, absolutely, that's a concern.
Sven calling it radicalization really hit home for me
because a big part of my work is doing counter-radicalization
out on -- out in frontline states,
and these techniques are the techniques
that are used in radicalization,
whether you're talking about Islamic State
or you're talking about neo-Nazis.
Engel: We've developed and have built the largest data platform
that -- that I know of in the world
that's missionally-aligned.
The church has the one thing that most companies
are absolutely desperate for, which is relationship.
We lost him.
The rushing source, the origin of the air, the garden gone.
Now, ever over a distant horizon, we lost him.
We chose to be without, unaware of what we had.
All of us together alone have forgotten what we lost.
My name is Gloria Beth Amodeo.
I'm a writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York,
and I was an evangelical Christian for seven years.
And I was converted by Campus Crusade for Christ,
which is known now as Cru.
Cru's mission is to convert basically the entire world
to the belief that Jesus Christ is Lord and savior
and no one goes to heaven without believing in him.
I was at college in New Jersey,
and so I was a part of Jersey Cru.
"Look how good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity,"
and then we have here, "Taking the state for Christ together."
I was a very vulnerable college student.
My mother had a pill addiction when I was growing up,
and I got just super scared about being out of control,
about the idea of, like, fraternities and sororities
and of college drinking and drug culture.
I walked into an office of student life,
went up to a teacher, and I remember, you know, just saying,
like, "Hey, I'm really scared.
I don't want to be pushed into doing anything
that I don't want to do."
You know, other student, after I left the office,
she kind of ran after me.
She said, "Hey, so I know your concerns.
I'm really sorry that you went through that
and you got scared."
She happened to be the president
of the Campus Crusade for Christ Club.
This person really became a mentor in my life.
I was just trying to figure out
what my life was going to look like,
who I was, and -- and who I wanted to be.
"An intimate message from God to you.
My child, you may not know me,
but I know everything about you."
All of these things that, you know,
when you're vulnerable,
it sounds really -- it sounds really good.
But what you're trained to do when you're in Cru
is identify those ripe apples.
They knew that with me,
they had an opportunity to go much deeper.
When I heard Campus Crusade for Christ, I thought,
"Oh, Christians, like me.
I should be able to fit in with these people."
What I didn'thear at the time was "evangelical Christian."
Some girl gave me this little heart.
This is the type of stuff that keeps you in it,
you know, when you form these really strong bonds
and, you know, you're basically told, like,
"I'm always here for you. I love you."
In a way,
getting to know them on all of these other levels
before they introduce their fundamentalist beliefs
made me trust them more in a sense
and made the beliefs seem less extreme
than I came to realize later on they were.
They hook you up with a staff member, a Cru discipler,
who is somebody who does not go to college on campus,
is above the age of 21.
They're married with children,
and they have this, like, idyllic adult life.
I think that that's, like, a part of the tactics.
Seeing that makes you think, "Oh, wow, this is possible."
Once she told me, "Jesus loves you.
Nothing's gonna take God's love away,"
all the warm, fuzzy stuff, after a few months,
then she starts saying, "The act of homosexuality is a sin.
Abortion is murder.
And if you're really going to have this big,
beautiful, wonderful life,
you have to believe these things, too."
We had a whole women's day
and -- and reflection questions that we had to answer.
This first section is called
"Present Your Bodies as a Living Sacrifice."
Her baby -- she was bouncing her baby on her lap,
I remember, at the time that we talked about this.
When, you know, you're married, as a woman,
you're supposed to submit to your husband.
I remember fighting against the Cru staff member.
I was like, "Why would I ever have to submit to my husband?
That sounds so strange. Like, do yousubmit to your husband?"
And she said, "Oh, yeah, I do, but -- but it's not so bad.
It's not as bad as you think it is."
Like, she said, "'Submission' only means
that he gets to have the final say."
And what happened was my disciplers,
the girl who converted me, slowly started to tell me
that I needed to start cutting my family out.
You know, they said, "Your mom's not very good for you.
You shouldn't talk to her on the phone anymore."
So very slowly, they began
isolating me away from my family,
and eventually, they started isolating me away
from my non-believing friends, as well,
who they felt like had too much of an influence on my life.
This here, underneath "your short-term goals,"
what Cru's mission was -- "continue to target
those in your life who need salvation."
Yeah, the word "target" there sticks out to me.
Cru is a global organization, yes.
Uh, they even are involved in the military,
interestingly enough.
They have a whole military chapter.
Says the main goal here, "Take the state together
and then take the country," is the -- is the idea.
Do you see any flags there
about people's personal vulnerabilities
or emotional vulnerability?
I don't think that would be something
they would broadly advertise because it sounds like
an evil supervillain thing to do.
So, alright, so go ahead and say it again.
You want me to just -- a little bit about who I am?
The big question on this is,
why would the Koch brothers do this at all?
Because they're not known for being particularly religious.
So to dig into this further, um,
we thought we'd start at the source
and go to the founder of Communio/COFI.
In 2014, I started the Culture of Freedom Initiative
at the Philanthropy Roundtable, and I had --
my public policy world used
and worked with predictive analytics
and -- and big-data tools within public policy
to identify folks who would be persuadable on certain issues.
What would it look like to use it within --
within the realm of ministry?
And so we, through the initiative,
funded the development of the data Insights platform.
Gloo already had some initial funders,
and we provided funding over time and helped to develop it
and helped to test it for a few years.
The multi church test using the data
with a focus on relationship ministry.
Every large company in the world,
if you sell consumer products of different sorts,
are trying to figure out good ways to market that,
and there's no better product, really, than the gospel.
Religious nones are on the rise in America,
only these nones are not religious at all.
They check the box for "none," N-O-N-E,
on surveys of religious affiliation.
But a growing number of churches
working in partnership with Communio
are seeing double-digit increases in weekly membership
and collections by architecting their ministry
around strengthening the core building block of community --
the family.
Communio's playbook is now available to your church.
We help a first church diagnose some -- some opportunities
around their church campus
by identifying an audience of, say, 5,000 folks
within 5 to 10 miles of a church's campus,
maybe have a marriage based on the consumer products data
looks like it might be struggling,
and so in their marriage, they have young kids,
and they're open to an invitation to church.
And then we'll reach out and help them
design ministry outreach invitations through Facebook,
where we'll reach out to that group of 5,000
or 10,000 folks who fit that risk area
and invite them in.
Come to a date-night event at the church
with that child-care provider.
They'll meet people at the church.
Invite them over for dinner,
invite them into their small group.
Now these couples who didn't previously have as robust
of their own personal network of friends
are introduced to these folks who want to know them.
Those couples can be guided over time
into what we would call a growth journey.
I think I read an article
that you said you kind of worked
with the original data guys, Cambridge Analytica,
when you set it up. Is that right?
We worked with a number of -- of data vendors.
We worked with, um -- in my old world in -- in public policy,
there is no shortage of really good vendors.
i360 is one of them. Um, uh...
From an efficacy perspective, um,
there's a lot of really good -- a lot of good firms out there,
and, um, uh, we've worked with --
we've worked with a number of them.
And with funding, I mean,
is it really passionate private investors?
Yeah, you know, I think you've hit on something
that's really central to the American experience.
Tocqueville talked about it in his "Democracy in America."
We have this really robust tradition in our country
of solving problems through voluntary civil action.
The United States has
the largest group of charitable donors in the world,
give more away in charity than any other country.
So, yeah, there's a lot of committed Christians
who we've met with and understand
that, you know, these resources that they have,
they see them as not theirs but God's.
Is there anybody you can mention by name?
Is there anyone you want to --
No, because what we do, you know,
most charities are this way.
You protect the privacy of the person
largely because it's a gospel imperative.
You don't want the right hand to know
what the left hand is doing.
I'm from Alabama.
All of this stuff happens where I'm from, where I grew up,
people I knew, churches I went to when I was younger.
Um, it was really time for us to, you know,
if we're gonna move this investigation forward
to head for the Bible Belt, let it out a couple of notches.
How does it feel to be in the south, Charles?
Well, it feels like a promise of decent weather.
The program isn't the only one.
Um, there are programs around grief,
around addiction recovery.
There's programs around divorce,
programs around financial trouble.
They're all trying to draw nonreligious people
into the church.
If you feel like you're alone in your grief,
be encouraged that you are not.
Whatever you're facing, others have faced it, too,
and at a loss of a spouse event,
there are people waiting to help.
You'll learn what to expect
in the weeks and months after your spouse's death
and how to survive the loneliness.
For more information,
talk with your pastor or GriefShare leader.
That is a real baptism,
not as a ritual baptism, which is by water.
Baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Notice the difference between the symbolism
and the real thing.
Turn right.
Just going offroad mode.
We are going offroad.
This is some kind of road to church.
So we are heading to the Peace Lutheran Church today
to, uh, speak to Pastor Zandt.
I've been in ministry now for 18 years.
I've said this to my leaders, my congregation --
the most, if you will, successful form
of connecting God's love
to these people in their lives
has been at the moment of grief,
and GriefShare has been a part of that.
Hi, I'm Kathy Fallon, and I'm super excited
to let you know that starting today,
people can register for you groups online.
They have a leader portal that you can get on
and access some of their publicity materials.
They have things specifically designed
for bulletins and fliers, newspaper ads,
things that you can host on Facebook,
little videos and so forth.
Sometimes, I forget Jodi's gone.
I knew in my head, you love God,
you trust him, you pray.
And that doesn't guarantee that things are gonna go well.
GriefShare has been a tremendous blessing to our church.
This young woman that went through an amazing loss
in her life, she was not a believer.
GriefShare -- the answers were given,
and she gave her heart and life to Jesus.
And they have a lot of sign-ups.
I saw each month, it's --
it grows exponentially really fast.
Yes, it does, yes,
and they have new types of entry events.
They have "Surviving the Holidays,"
those who are preparing for Thanksgiving, Christmas,
as you know, very difficult times,
to give you tools to help you through that,
and then they introduce you
to the 13-week series of GriefShare, uh,
to give you a taste of what that's like.
Skeptics.
A man of science,
but a man of faith, and he stood in front of me.
And when he would stand in front of the people
and teach them the prayer,
you know how he explained prayer?
He said, "It's simply this -- it's a chit-chat with God."
Chit-chat with God.
In the late '90s, that's when the church growth movement
was at its height.
You know, you had the Saddleback community churches,
you had the Willow Creek's model for outreach.
There is to some extent an expectation
or a pressure many times from the congregation to conform
or to try to find outreach
similar or reflective of some of the great models
that came out of Saddleback and in Willow Creek.
He wrestled with God. All the...
For me personally, ministry has been a challenge.
We're seeing in the midst of Christianity
schisms left and right, um,
that trickles down into the congregation.
The institution of church in the states
is so powerful and so moneyed.
Do you ever worry about exploitation,
about the churches not being
what Christianity is supposed to be?
Do you see examples of that?
Do I worry about it?Yeah.
Every single day.
David was a great guy and a really good church.
You know, he seemed like he was, um, part of a big system
but not part of the machinations of it,
so what we needed to do is move on to -- to a bigger church,
something a little more mega.
Where we rolling out of?
Montgomery, Alabama.
I used to live here a long, long time ago.
Not many stick around that much.
We're headed to Fairhope now.
It's my favorite part of Alabama.
Is the baby happy?
Yeah.
Aww, is she staring out the -- is she staring out the sky?
Yeah.
Katalina?
Hi, I'm Mike.Nice to meet you.
This is Carrie.
Hi, Carrie, nice to meet you.
I'm so glad y'all are here with us today.
This is our office space,
and, uh, kind of a -- kind of a new space for us.
Our different groups like GriefShare
that meets here during the week.
Okay, that's great.
So this is where we meet.
We average about 13 people,
but I think when we started, there was about 20,
25 people that kind of enrolled.
And so sometimes, they can make it,
sometimes, they can't.
The most amazing thing about Celebrate Recovery
is the idea of a person who's been abused worshiping God
in a room next to a person who was an abuser,
and God's honored by it.
I -- Do you understand?
Do you know what I mean?
That's what God's capable of through Celebrate Recovery.
That's the difference between Celebrate Recovery
and most other recovery programs.
So this building -- this was the original building,
by the way,
that was built here in the year 2000.
It has been a number of different things.
So if we continue walking, this is our brand-new space.
We've been -- We've been here
just four Sundays now.
State-of-the-art computer check-in.
Type in their name,
and ups pops all their information.
You say, "Check in, my child," and it checks them in.
And how big is your congregation?
On Sunday morning, we typically --
around 3,000 in total.
So you've got quite a young demographic, then.
I do. Lot of young families
gather here with us on Sunday mornings.
Do you -- Do you make specific efforts
to -- to make that happen, or is it just --
We do, we do.
We use a variety of tools to -- to be able
to, uh, kind of leverage social media
and modern technology with, uh, with -- with church.
It helps us attract people.
It helps us to, uh, track teams.
It helps us to keep track of all the -- of the kids that are here
and, um, and everything, donations.
We do Facebook Live on --
we were talking about that on the weekend,
so our services are broadcast live.
Our preschool space,
where the -- our little ones gather.
Oh, this great.
This is new, a new wall that they put in
to kind of give parents an idea
of how much longer they have with their children.
I had a lot of questions about that baby wall.
I recognize that from that church's app,
who did this countdown to days of influence thing.
So each of the little foam things in there
represents the -- the weeks that you have,
so as a baby,
you have 936 weeks to influence your child.
You know, you can be sure in that app
if you've got your push notifications on,
it's, uh, waking you up and reminding you.
It's like, "You've only got 877 days to save your child."
It's a behavioral design mechanism.
And then when you come over here,
when your child is now a senior in high school,
you only have 52 weeks left.
Oh, don't make her cry.
That's really powerful.
It's very powerful to me, just --
Yeah. Yeah. Just a reminder of, you know,
the -- the top of the clock is ticking
and time is limited
to -- to influence your child for -- for good.
How will you use your time?
Yeah.
It's mostly software-based where we can --
it's -- it's tracking.
It's really we're able to custom tailor it to what we do,
how we track people,
how we want to communicate with those people.
The data that you have on -- on the people who already come --
Doesn't that help you reach other people in the community?
Sure, sure. When you're talking about, you know,
a database of 20,000 or so people,
20,000 people know a lot -- a lot of people,
so -- so it -- it -- it gets all over.
If you come to a point where -- where --
God's in control.
You can't go two miles here without a church.
I have to say, as a European,
seeing how powerful
and moneyed these churches are,
I'm -- I'm amazed.
Well, Americans are big believers,
and a lot of that has to do with money, too.
If you're British and you are working-class,
it doesn't matter how much money you make in your life,
you will always be working class.
And if you're upper class,
it doesn't matter how much money you lose
or how much reputation, you will always be upper class.
True.
And in America, everybody's like three paychecks away
from getting thrown out of their house.
If you get rich, then you can go in a restaurant
and flip the table over.
They're gonna invite you back
as long as you can pay for the bill.
And if you are poor, you're just out,
so nobody in America really knows where they stand.
And when you don't know where you stand,
then you have to invoke systems that you can find your place in,
and so Americans become real believers.
There's the battleship USS Alabamajust over there.
Good eating, good drinking, and it's damn good music.
It feels good every time I get back to Alabama,
and -- and it feels strange at the same time.
It's home and it's not home simultaneously.
I spent about half my childhood in deep South
and when I wasn't out traveling.
I identify with the South now,
even if I don't identify with Southern politics.
I've been living in Europe for 30 years,
although I've lost my accent.
You know when I go back home, people think I'm Canadian.
At this point, my head was full.
Multiple companies that seemed to be helping people,
but did they have a dark side?
I needed to see Chris Vickery.
With that hard drive he brought to parliament,
he was the first person who explained how it all worked.
I mean, what does the church know about you data-wise?
The church doesn't need to know data-wise.
The church just needs to know your name,
possibly your address...Mm-hmm.
...maybe your phone number.
That's a good identifier, too.
Then United in Purpose
and -- or any other big-data operation
has all the data already about these different names.
The data they don't necessarily have
is what church you go to.
That's where the link comes together. Okay.
And so if they have, say, a name and a phone number,
they can match it up to everything else --
all your views, the websites you go to,
your -- your Facebook handle,
your Twitter commentary, all that stuff.
And they've already got a sentiment value on you,
and they know whether or not
you're a likely Trump voter or not.
They just need to know what church you go to.
I'm from the Bible Belt.
This is my community. You know, it touches me.
This is people I went to high school with.
This is people that I know.
They are learning
who is likely to be a drug addict,
who is likely to be, uh, going through a divorce
because, uh, well, they don't come out and say this,
but, uh, those are the types of people
that are easily manipulated.
Chris Vickery made it clear that this whole thing was political.
Um, the voter-record leak was from United in Purpose,
a company that was founded
by a guy who had been convicted for embezzlement.
Um, my concern, though, was on the big prize,
which is the 2020 election.
Could you maybe talk a little bit about
how somebody would use a third-party data set
for a church app,
that -- how that can then be used politically?
Well...
if you can figure out that 95%
of the people that are interested in Thing A
are overlapping with people that tend
to join your church in your area,
then you don't need to guess and target --
you can target the people in your area that have Trait A.
If you know that this person
buys these things at the grocery store
and you know that their friend, you know, Beth,
comes to the same church, has a kid about the same age,
but you don't have her grocery-store information,
If you have three other friends that you do,
you can pretty much guess that she buys
about the same type of brands that these other ones do.
So even though you only have one little spoke here,
it feeds back into
the main data pool of predictability,
and all of a sudden, you have this ability
to enumerate things about Beth
or you can draw it out in -- in other teasing ways.
But someone might say,
"It's just my name and my phone number."
For one individual, yes.
With one person,
it's like one single grain of gunpowder,
the explosive powder,
and you can, you know, light that with a match.
And, you know, that was fun. You know, no harm done.
But when you've got, uh, a huge pile of it,
you don't want a match to get anywhere near it
because it'll kill you.
They will go to a big megachurch,
get the pastor, preacher,
to give them a database of members of the church,
and they'll run it through their systems and figure out
who's registered to vote and who isn't.
And they will identify
people that are registered to vote,
like the social conservative,
Republican conservative type feelings,
very anti-gay, very anti-abortion,
very hard line,
and they'll find one of those people
and make them into a champion.
And then it's up to the champion
that is a registered voter
to convince the non-registered congregation members
that feel the same way to register to vote,
so it's a very selective cherry picking of,
"We want these certain types of religious people
to register to vote and then vote."
It's all there on paper, but, uh, when you map it all out,
it looks like one of those conspiracy boards.
Conspiracies happen behind closed doors with unnamed actors
attempting to deceive the public.
They happen in the dark.
This is happening in large part out in the open.
They're using the tools of democracy
to dismantle democracy.
It's not really that they're trying to deceive us.
It's that we're not listening.
I'm always online trawling
and I'm paying a lot of attention to the news,
and on Chris' Twitter feed,
this journalist and author pops up.
Her name is Anne Nelson,
and she's suddenly talking about an organization
that seems connected to every aspect of this.
That's the Council for National Policy,
and Bingo, there we are.
This is a defining moment for our generation.
And our people need leaders.
Pastor, lead, and the people will follow.
America is crying out for leaders.
We see what happens when we don't elect and choose leaders.
America is ailing.
America is dying for the lack of leaders.
Anne was about to launch a book
with the Texas Book Festival,
so it was back on the road again.
This time, I took my mother, who's a writer, Judith Richards.
How is it driving in this weather?
Um, I'm aware that everyone I love is in the car.
How did you come across this story?
I came across it visiting my family in Oklahoma...
...driving to Walmart and having the radio on
and idly turning this -- the tuner to a different station
and coming across a fundamentalist broadcaster.
Dobson: The homosexual community will tell us
that transformations never occur,
that you cannot change.
We did research on those who attended
just one of a number of ministries for at least a year,
and out of those, 38% of the people
who attended this large ministry
no longer struggle with homosexuality.
Those are success stories, as well.
Even if they struggle,
if they continue to walk with Jesus,
that's a win for the kingdom of God.
At the time, I thought, "Well, this must be
just some local outlet with this opinion,"
and then when I pursued it,
I found out it was part of a network of 100 stations
that was part of a trio of networks, radio,
and then multimedia platforms.
I just kind of followed the media analysis
back to the Council for National Policy,
which I'd never heard of
until I-I did this research two years ago.
What is the Council for National Policy?
The Council for National Policy is a network of organizations
interested in advancing an ultra-conservative agenda.
The meetings are secret. The membership is secret.
The publications for the public are next to non-existent.
We're here.
It's all well and good to be a one-man band,
but I'm no investigative journalist.
I needed to understand it all,
so I called in the troops in Texas.
Anne Nelson has received
a Livingston Award for journalism
and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research.
A graduate of Yale University,
she's taught at Columbia University for over two decades.
She's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
and the New York Council on the Humanities.
She's a native of Oklahoma,
which we may talk about, uh, and now lives in New York City,
and her book that we're here to discuss today is
"Shadow Network: Media, Money,
and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right."
The Council for National Policy --
Kellyanne Conway is a member.
Steve Bannon is a member,
uh, and then I went through the members
of Trump's evangelical advisory council.
About a third of the members of that council are members.
The influence is quite striking.
They have a social agenda,
which is to roll back civil and political rights
for the LGBT community, women, and others.
The three components tend to be religious fundamentalists.
Another part of the hub is
is the extractive industries, oil interests.
And the third component are political operatives
who have been trying to push the Republican Party
to the right since the Nixon administration.
In order to achieve this, they have to really reify
the idea of the United States as a Christian nation
in which their form of Christianity is dominant.
It involves allowing their churches
and their religious organizations to function
as full-fledged partisan political activists
while maintaining their tax-exempt status.
June 21, 2016, they invited a thousand fundamentals leaders
to New York City to meet Trump on his home ground,
and they cut a deal.
And the deal was pretty transparently
that they would lend their ground troops,
their data operations, which were very advanced,
and their strategists to the Trump campaign
in exchange for three vital elements.
One was allowing them to fully participate
in the selection of federal judges.
One was an evangelical council that was dominated by members
of the Council for National Policy.
The religious leaders in the Council for National Policy
have been -- become converts.
Many of them were Never Trumpers before June 2016,
and they decided that Trump, if he was not a manof God,
could be an instrumentof God.
They call him Cyrus after the Persian king
who helped restore the Jews to Jerusalem,
and Cyrus was not a man of God.
He was an instrument of God.
Their theorists will say outright
that the American government is slated for destruction.
They think that it should be destroyed.
In that way,
they hope to use Trump as God's wrecking ball.
By the time we arrived,
Brent had a surprise for us -- the Council for National Policy.
You hacked them?
No, no, no, they're just really poorly organized websites,
so if I -- what I did was I tried a few search terms
and landed by accident on a "This page doesn't exist" page.
And it gave me a complete archive
of the structure of the website,
plus the search function that was for members only,
and from there, you could basically map out
their entire operation from 2015 onwards.
The D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Leadership
is training the next generation of leaders to stand for Christ.
And for the many Christians that I bump into that say,
you know, "God's written off Washington, D.C.,"
I just laugh and say, "You ought to come
and see what God's doing on this hill."
It's one thing to be a Christian
and feel that calling of God,
but how much better if they're really equipped
so that when they get -- get there,
people put their faith in them voting for them,
when they get to office,
they really know how to make a difference.
They've concentrated on winning state houses,
something that has been neglected by the Democrats,
and through coordinated rewriting of laws
through states that pass restrictive laws,
and if they achieve a certain percentage of the state houses
with Republican governments that support their agenda,
they can call a constitutional convention.
There, they could do a large-scale transformation
of the US government principles.
What's a constitutional convention?
Oh, it's where the states get together
and decide whether and how to rewrite the US Constitution.
It hasn't happened for a long time.
There's two ways to rewrite the US Constitution --
the hard way and the easy way.
The hard way is that you go state by state,
amendment by amendment,
and nobody gets anywhere that way,
especially if you want to reengineer the entire document.
The easy way, or at least the way they see it,
is that you call a constitutional convention.
Now, to do that, you have to get 2/3 of state legislatures
to call a constitutional convention around a --
at least a single issue,
but once the convention has been called,
then you can introduce whatever other issues you want to.
So you have the opportunity to rewrite the whole thing.
You can handle marriage equality.
You can handle issues of women's rights,
abortion, federal regulation, term limits.
Hi, CNP friends. Father Frank Pavone here,
national director of Priests for Life.
Thank you for all your support
and collaboration of us -- with us
at Priests for Life for ending abortion.
I have here my MAGA hat,
which I'm sure that many of you have,
and I wear it proudly. Many people say,
"Oh, I've never seen a priest wearing that MAGA hat,"
but we're gonna go forward with confidence into 2020
and reelect the most pro-life president we've ever had.
I would like to recognize some of our new members
that have joined the Board of Governors and the Gold Circle,
um, and if you're here -- and I think everyone is here --
if you please stand, we'd just simply like to recognize you
and welcome you.
JP De Gance and his wife, Christina De Gance.
De Gance was a member.
Of course he was a member.
Here's what ties everything together,
but really, De Gance is just one small cog in this big machine
and this big power movement
that brings all these companies together.
Well, thank you. My name is JP De Gance.
I'm the founder and president of Communio.
The initial pitch to donors from John Paul De Gance
in the Culture of Freedom Initiative
to the Philanthropy Roundtable Summit,
he ran a webinar for those donors
where he outlined the project.
Communio is an organization -- if I put my slides up --
serves churches to strengthen marriages
and families at a citywide scale.
Allpress: And it spells out the political context
within which this has been driven.
It had breakdowns of the presidential elections
over a series of cycles every four years,
running through to the 2030s.
They were looking at state by state, uh,
what the differences in voting patterns were based on marriage,
church attendance, and religious affiliation,
which denomination you belong to.
I get that that's very good for the church
to follow its principles of outreach
into the community to help people.
What I'm not understanding is what's the relationship
with the Republicans.
In the initial pitch to donors
for the -- for the microtargeting platform,
they identified this demographic problem,
that there was a very strong correlation
between non-church attendance
and people who don't vote for Republicans.
Effectively, what they're saying is we can engineer
a shift in the population to get that extra percentage
we need of voters
who can tip the balance within a particular electorate.
My name is JP De Gance.
I'm the Executive Vice President of the Philanthropy Roundtable.
I know many of you on today's call
are joining us for the first time
and aren't as familiar with this project,
its goals, and what it's accomplished to date,
so by way of some background,
the Culture of Freedom Initiative
is a donor-led effort led by a task force of business leaders
and of differing faiths from around the country.
We're going -- We'll go right over
into the intro of -- of -- of Will Held,
who's our Chief Operating Officer
of the Culture of Freedom Initiative.
Will and I actually met some years ago
when we both worked for these, uh, brothers
out of Wichita, Kansas, the Koch brothers,
and we were both --
we jokingly call ourselves recovering political hacks.
So I'm going to skip over here to the audience builder.
Right now, it defaults to the entire United States,
so there's 206 million folks in the database.
You can add the family dynamic of "propensity for divorce."
You can model a number of different behaviors
or tendencies towards behavior, including opioid dependance,
um, different mental-health disorders.
He modeled praying, he modeled fasting,
He modeled mourning, and he modeled weeping,
but he also ended up doing something based upon the data.
They're targeting
extraordinarily vulnerable individuals --
Young, struggling couples,
millennials who aren't gonna be able to afford a house
or they may be trying to make payments on a mortgage,
or they're struggling with all the costs of medical insurance.
They struggling with a member of the family
who may be having a dependency problem.
So I go into my church.
Yep.I fill out a survey.
Yep.
I trust the institution I think is trying to help me.
I'm revealing myself emotionally through this survey,
and then that information, I believe,
is being anonymized for my church.
Yeah.
But then that information ends up going where?
It goes into the database
for the Insights microtargeting platform.
Also around the church
but who look like they're credit-card-dependent
in order to pay their bills,
and they can basically run marketing to this
custom-created audience through a number of different platforms,
including the major social-media platforms
of Facebook and Twitter.
This was a way of shifting the demographic balance
in key swing states in order to build up a bigger pool
of potential Republican presidential voters.
Looks like we're going to be coming to Denver,
Fort Worth, and Austin.
We're beginning to work with funders in those cities,
so if you're interested in learning more, just come see me.
Thank you.
Do people in churches know
that their personal information
is being gathered
to use in political campaigns
for the Republicans on the right?
No.
The churches that were actually, you know,
doing a good job in the past,
those churches don't necessarily realize
that effectively, those church leaders
in some of the smaller churches are also being exploited.
If you have a defense grade system,
a weapon system of influence,
what it is looking for
is the weaknesses in people.
That influence is only really necessary on the battlefield
to either break the will of the enemy
or to bring together the will of the -- of the people
who are uncommitted
that you want to make committed to your cause.
Every preacher we've talked to,
every pastor we've talked to,
I'm not even sure that they have a-an inkling
of what's going on here
in terms of what's happening with the data
and the way it's been obtained.
What do you think the congregation would say
if they realized that potentially,
a defense-grade system
of recognition of their neurosis
to radicalize them in a certain way
that is befitting of a political party --
that is something like that of George Orwell.
Where's the regulation? Where's the rules?
And what the strategists have done in this movement
is say, "Alright, we don't have to win
the general election.
That's not the way our system works."
You win the Electoral College. How do you do that?
You go after the swing states,
18 million people scattered across 4 to 6 states.
We know where they are.
So which ones are in churches?
Now we download the church directories with the support
of the pastors enlisted in this movement --
between 70,000 and 80,000 in the United States.
We will then compare the -- the directories
with who's registered.
Then we will decide
which of these voters we want to activate.
We want to discourage the others
from the same congregation, right?
But on the face of it, what the parishioners see is,
"You're an American. Go vote.
We're gonna give you a voter guide
that strongly suggests how to vote."
Whoever was financing Brexit
or whoever was financing Trump,
they certainly want their pound of flesh at the end of it.
People don't put millions,
tens of millions into a campaign
unless they think they're going to get a return on their investment.
I can say that for sure.
The ultimate position to be in
in a state of war is when your adversary
has no idea that they're in a war.
The stakes are that high,
and in fact, these systems of civil society
that we've worked so very, very hard to build,
they can crumble and disappear.
We continue to offer up our children
as living sacrifices to the Moloch of government schools.
A lot of effort's been wasted on school reform.
Government schools are no more reformable
than Soviet collective farms.
This movement is attacking a lot of the institutions
that taxpayers have formed to care for people,
like the Affordable Care Act, like public education,
and then when they are defunded
and start to wobble,
they say, "See, they're failing.
Come see our parallel universe,
see our fundamentalist schools,
see our so-called
Christian collective health-care entities."
So they're trying to set up institutions
that address all of these needs
and make people dependent on --
on their entire superstructure.
I feel that Americans
have gotten lazy about democracy.
People say, "Oh, why don't theydo something?"
And I say, "Who do you think 'they' is?"
Today on Family Talk...
Jesus is Lord not just over the church.
He's Lord over government and over the universe.
We need to start acting like that.
I have a map of the second floor
of the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans.
This shows where all the different sessions
of the Council for National Policy
are going to be happening.
There's a big Catholic mass.
There's a board meeting 4:30 to 5:30,
and we have booked this Vermilion Room.
My secret recorders are these.
It's your cross, and it's an HD camera.
It's got a little camera in it.
You know, I'm gonna vote for people that's more in line
with what the Bible said.
Man #2: The founders put in the impeachment clause
just so if someone came in
and they were the worst villain you ever saw in your life,
you had a way to be able to write about it.
Well, they impeached Clinton.Yeah.
And really, nothing changed.
I didn't agree with the way he was living his life,
but does that make him not fit to be the president?
It's a mistake back then.
It's an even bigger mistake.
You know what I thought? Man named Jesus.
In the end, we're all sinners.
Hello. - Hey, baby. I miss you.
Just calling you to tell you I'm in New Orleans.
I am just, uh, driving down Canal Street.
There's a big police thing going on across the street from me.
Trying to get to my hotel.
I am so sorry I'm not with you.
I am sorry you're not with me, too.
I wasn't scared at first.
I thought I was on a bit of an adventure.
You know, it's like, "Okay,
I'm going to get my microphones, record undercover
at the Council for National Policy
and, you know, be the first person who's ever done it."
And it would be really exciting,
and I-I wasn't scared about it at all.
But then I get there, and they say, "Well, you know,
there's gonna be no ins or outs to the hotel."
And I'm like,
"This is -- This is the Ritz-Carlton, Canal Street.
What do you mean no ins or outs to the hotel?
Who shuts down Canal Street?"
The plan had been that I had booked
one of the rooms for lunch, but then they canceled that.
They told us there were going to be
no in or outs between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.,
and I thought, "Fuck it, I'll book breakfast
and just stay for a long time."
I'm in the hotel.
I can't even get out of the hotel if I want to,
so I'm gonna wander around and shoot what I can.
...and blessing we received,
and we now look forward to another six hours
in which we will receive that which you would have us to know
to be more effective missionaries
and -- and soldiers for you. Amen.
And we're going to do during this luncheon time
is to provide expertise in how you can judge
the best place to give your assets.
Talk to me about what you saw.
You know, I saw a lot of stuff.
I saw a lot of business being done.
That's one of the things that I came away from with this.
Like, man, there's a lot of money floating around,
a lot of arrogance, a lot of power.
Many of you, and we, too, on executive committee,
have expressed a need to -- for the conservative movement
to be as organized, especially as we approach 2020.
Today, we are offering you an entrepreneurial look
at how you might become an activist on your own.
So the election taught us it's broken up,
and the churches aren't networking.
Could we apply what we know about media to that
and float the idea
to a policy organization in California, which we've done?
And we will fund a division in there,
and they'll do nothing but try and network the churches.
So this is super quick, right?
We can do that fast.
Going up or down?
Going up, yeah.
Are we funding the past
or are we funding the future?
Talked with JP De Gance, who has Communio,
who's -- who's working on saving marriages
and lowering divorce rates in key cities
with a very innovative almost franchise concept
where they take something, what works in one city
and replicates it in the other, and it's pretty exciting.
Connelly: There are about 36 electoral votes
to play with in the election.
Donald Trump won Michigan by 12,000 votes
at 16 electoral votes.
Pennsylvania's 20, and Wisconsin's 10.
The line in the middle, you see, is the line you cannot cross.
My attorneys at both the state and the federal level
spent an enormous amount of time.
Think about it.
We've identified key voters. We know they want to go our way.
It's like what I do with pastors now with my C3.
We can't give that to the campaign
when they need it the most.
So, we've got to figure out how to do that.
Some groups have to disclose the donors.
Others don't. What's dark money?
This is the big phrase.
But it's political spending that's meant to influence voters
where money is not disclosed, and sources are not known.
C4 organizations -- political nonprofits.
That means they've got a purpose to what they're doing.
They can't do political purpose things.
They can't spend more than, like, 49.9%.
But they can spend that IE money
specifically for an organization or candidate.
And they can engage in those political activities
as long as they are defined
not to be the primary purpose of the organization.
Then, I finally made my way to the Vermillion Room.
And then, I get there, and there's all these
Secret Service types.
Thank you.
And I thought, "Hey, who's here?"
What's this about?
So, we need to get people in our churches,
our organizations,
every group you have a sphere of influence with,
to do voter registration,
and make sure they're part of that.
We know that helps.
Because once voter registration has been done,
those names go into the state election records.
Then, that's accessible for the campaign, the candidate.
They know who those people are.
If you're not doing anything else,
make sure you're helping to sponsor and run
voter-registration drives everywhere you possibly can.
Keep this in mind as I wrap up.
36 electoral votes to play with.
Got to think about this for 2020.
I saw a group of tourists getting ready to go
and I thought, "If I can just slide up behind them,
and be a part of what they're doing,
then I can slip out with them, if they manage to get out."
Past security.
Past the Secret Service.
And then, I was scared. Yeah.
It's like, "Am I gonna end up with a Taser in my back,
or thrown in jail in Louisiana?"
Nobody wants to be thrown in jail in Louisiana.
And then, past the friendly cop waiting outside.
How did you feel when you realized
the vice president was going to come?
Oh, like I need to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.
You know, like, "Get the hell out right now."
But in this very close race that took place,
that allowed America to change course
it was made possible.
because of our speaker this morning,
the 48th vice president of the United States,
ladies and gentlemen, Mike Pence.
Hello, CNP.
You are a sight for sore eyes.
I bring greetings from President Donald Trump.
Isn't he something?
I'll tell you.
You know, some people think he and I
are a little bit different.
And I'll tell you what, he and I have become very close friends.
Thank you for your enduring support,
and frankly, the leadership in the council
that the Council for National Policy
advises and gives this administration every single day.
Thanks for standing strong with this president
and this administration.
A young person asked me just the other day,
they said, "How do you deal with the socialist agenda?"
And I said, "We talk about freedom."
We tell freedom's story to this rising generation.
'Cause it's not gonna be enough for us
just to win the next election.
We've got to win the next generation for freedom.
So CNP, in the face of their radical agenda
and destructive politics,
now more than ever, we've got to educate.
We've got to communicate. And we've got to mobilize.
We've got to run so as to win.
And every day between now and Election Day --
and if you're inclined to bow the head and bend the knee,
Over the next year and a month
would be a good time to do it.
What was your impression of this movement
after having seen it on the inside?
I come from a conservative family of churchgoers,
but they're not trying to take people's rights away.
They're just conservatives.
These people, they're not conservatives.
They're radicals.
Is the fear greater than the virus itself?
Man #2: President Trump and his administration,
they've acted decisively,
they've acted responsibly, to respond to this virus.
And they got ahead of it very early.
Man #3: It does appear that the administration
is taking all of the right steps.
The president, in my view...
Staver: I am encouraging churches all over the country
to participate in Reopen Church Sunday,
the first Sunday in May -- Reopen Church Sunday.
You can go to reopenchurch.org.
Donald Trump rose to power with the assistance of a movement
that denies science, bashes government,
and has prioritized loyalty over professional expertise.
I want to go first to my -- straight to my first guest,
the 48th vice president of the United States,
Vice President Mike Pence.
Tony Perkins, it is good to be with you on "Washington Watch."
That has obviously contributed to our inability
to address this crisis in an evidence-based fashion.
Misinformation is rife in those hyper-conservative
and hyper-partizan religious communities
that were all in for Trump.
Now, the projections are that we're going to see less than
100,000 fatalities as a result of this -- the virus.
That's significantly lower than some projections.
Is this the result of the, as you said, people heeding
the guidance of the CDC, and quite frankly,
the prayers that have been lifted up?
Progress that we're beginning to see is -- we really believe
is evidence that the American people understand
that their future is in their hands.
Ordinarily, the kinds of consequences
of this type of behavior
don't really show up for some time.
In the case of a pandemic that's killing people,
the consequences are too obvious to ignore.
Churches have worked, I think,
very well with the administration.
Mr. Vice President, I do appreciate you joining us today.
And I would encourage you --
I know the Justice Department is on this,
but as evidence emerges that there may have been some
that went too far
in singling out religious institutions,
that's something that's addressed in the days ahead.
Because while we're all in this together,
these fundamental freedoms must be defended
and protected here at home, because it does
have implications for what we do abroad, as well.
Narrator: In times of crisis, people and communities
often turn to the church for guidance and support.
In these times,
how can churches rise up, and find new ways
to be a light in their community?
Considering the present climate and concerns around coronavirus,
you can register your church
in the Community Services Directory.
You'll also have access to four customizable surveys
that you can use to get a pulse on how your people are doing.
Learn more, and sign up for free today.
The moral that you should probably look for --
it depends on how long you've got,
and how much time you've got, until the rest of it,
which is the Russian connection.
Is the camera rolling at the moment, in terms of what --
I'll do it when the camera's off on this one, actually.
'Cause that's -- that's one that'll get you killed.