>> and now for the author discussion live from the texas book festival, here is a conversation about conservative leadership in american politics today. .. >> okay, good. i see thumbs up. all right. welcome to the c-span2 booktv tent, or welcome back if you've been here before. it's really an honor to be here both with respect to texas book festival, which is a great cultural institution of austin and texas, and also c-span2 booktv which is a great american institution.

i say that without any, in utter earnestness. it's really great to be able to turn on the tv and see serious discussions about books and literature x it's great to have them here in austin and to be a part of it. my name is dan oppenheimer, i'm the moderator today. i think i'm here moderating these books because i wrote a book a few years ago about prominent americans who went from the left to the right of the political spectrum, and your panel today is really about american conservativism. it's sort of past, present and future. and the no, sir i have with me -- the authors i have with me today are anne nelson and tom lobianco. i just want to remind everyone that anne and tom will be in the signing tent after this. their books are for sale in the book tent. anne let me know that this is, her book actually doesn't come out til later in this coming week, but they made a special

exception for austinen. so if you want the special right, hot off the presses before anybody else can get it copies of her book, they're available, and she'll be available to sign them, and tom will be available to sign his book. so let me introduce our two authors. i'm going to talk to them and they're going to talk to each other for about a half hour, and then we'll have about 15 minutes for questions from the audience. you can see the mic right up here in the middle aisle, so you can maybe start lining up a little bit before that time, and we'll get to as many questions as we can. so anne nelson has received a livingston award for her journalism and a guggenheim fellowship for her historical research, a graduate of yale university. she's taught at columbia university for over two decades, first at the psychological of journalism and then at the school of -- at the school of journalism. she's a member of the new york council of humanities. her previous books include red orchestra and suzanne's children, a finalist for the

national jewish book award. she's a native of oklahoma, which we may talk about, and now lives in new york city, and her book today is "shadow network: media money and the secret hub of the radical right." tom lobianco is a longtime mike pence reporter. i don't know if that's on your business card -- [laughter] but he has covered mike pence from the statehouse to white house for a host of organizations including the associated press, cnn and the indianapolis star. he's a regular political analyst on national television and radio. and he is not currently employed as a staff writer anywhere because he has been writing this book and now touring the on it for the last six months or so -- [laughter] >> it feels like that. >> but his book is "piety and power: mike pence and the taking of the white house." so i have kind of a similar question for both of you or which is give me an origin story

for your subject. so for mike pence or the council for national policy. and it doesn't have to be the whole story, but just give me an origin story that helps explain why we're here talking about them and why they matter. >> sure. so i started covering mike pence when he ran for governor. he launched for governor of indiana in june 2011, and i've covered a number of governors in maryland, in indiana, plenty of politicians over the years. i can tell you that he is absolutely the most boring person i've ever -- [laughter] and to be honest with you, i felt like every, like, i would go to these events, and he was so adept at being boring that we never really got much out of them. and when he became vice president, i'm like, i just felt like we had to crack, we had to crack the veil. it just, we had to break past it

to understand him. and as it turns out, there's quite a bit there. there's more to this guy than we ever understood. one of my longtime sources put it this way, he says boring is his camouflage. so, yeah. [laughter] >> and in my case, i have lived in new york city for many years, but i always go back and visit my participants in -- my parents in stillwater, oklahoma, quite often. and my origin story was around 2004, and i was driving to walmart as we all do, and i had the radio on, and i just turned the channel. i got to a broadcast that was a religious call-in show where the moderator was saying that if john kerry became president, he would instill gay marriage, and that would make everyone's marriage to, between a man and a

woman, threatened. and this woman called in and said i've been married to my husband for 50 years, you mean we won't be legally married? [laughter] no, ma'am, your marriage will be in danger if john kerry becomes president. and i was, like, that's not right. [laughter] so i just kind of tucked that away. and then as i went on and i do, i've done a lot of media research at columbia and, of course, we looked at international media systems and digital transformations and so on. i was, like, what about radio? what about the political power of radio? what about radio in states where people drive a lot in their cars. and i went back to that radio station and found out that it was a network with a hundred stations, and it was affiliated with another one that had another hundred stations, and it was affiliated with a third that had over a hundred stations, and it distributed con p tent over -- content to over 2,000 other stations. and much of the content was this

kind of one-sided political messaging that had nothing to do with journalism. so so i started connecting the dots which led back to the council for national policy, which led to my book. >> so, and, you know, we'll get more into sort of what the council for national policy is and what mike pence is. there's a question i want to ask you, because when we're dealing with sort of politically-charged subject the in a highly politically-charged, politically-polarized time, it's very easy to sort of fall into a posture of skepticism or cynicism towards the people who represent politics other than yours. and so i want to push you guys and ask you what, in your best estimation -- and you are the experts on these people and organizations -- what do you believe they believe? why are they doing what they're doing? what makes mike pence run, you know, and what is at the heart, what ises the vision of america

or the desire for what america would be at the heart of the council for national policy as they see it? >> hmm. [laughter] you know, the thing with mike pence, and, you know, i try to get into this, when i was doing the research and the reporting, you find that there's not a very fixed core for him. in many ways he's a, almost a stereotype of a politician; sticking his finger in the breeze to see which way it's blowing. but there is, there are certain benchmarks on him. he does feel that he is called to this. i take that, i do take that to be seriously, whether or not anyone agrees with, you're, with that, they believe that. him and his wife. >> called by god. >> called by god, yes. >> yeah. >> based -- you know, let me,

two anecdotes that i think help explain him. and he's a middle child, and my apologies -- [laughter] i'm the oldest of three, so -- >> yeah. a lot to say. [laughter] >> in the 1970s he is in middle school. it's catholic grade school in columbus, indiana, st. columbus. and i was talking with one of his high school friends x they told me that, you know, he would always talk about wanting to be president. but one day he comes back to school, and he tells all his classmates that his mother had toll him that -- told him that he should be president. it's that push, that affirmation you don't see him actively running for president until three decades later, and what is it with him? he's not a leader, he's a follower.

that's fundamentally -- i call him a lagging indicator of where the politics of the moment is. [laughter] when my editor and i were working on this -- >> that would have been a good title for the book, by the way, lagging indicator: the biography of mike pence. all right. >> when -- you don't see him actively, and i didn't even notice this until i finished writing the book and started talking about it more, i did not see it because i was so thick in the weeds that i could not appreciate it, he does not actively start running for president until somebody pushes him to run for president. and who is that somebody? or somebodies? and the answer is the could be ill for national policy. council for national policy. in 2008. and that's, and that's when he actively starts running for president. so he's not a driven person. he's more of a pushed person. >> another good title for your book. [laughter] so to some extent the answer,

tom, is we don't know, i mean, we don't know, maybe there's not an answer to the what makes mike pence run other than other people, but there very much is an answer to what makes the could be ill of national policy push. >> yeah. it's a group of fundamentalists, many of them based in oklahoma, texas and louisiana, who see the public acceptance of homosexuality as a threat, and they are driving that and trying to roll back political and civil rights for the lgbt population. quite actively. and also to establish themselves as having a kind of dominion over every aspect of life because they say that they have a direct communication with god who instructs them how to rule over the rest of us. another branch of the organization or another part of

the hub the extractive industries. again, based in oklahoma, texas and louisiana, oil interests. and they object strenuously to environmental regulations that protect pure air and water and prevent toxic waste dumps and other things because it is detrimental to their profits. they also object to taxes, and they wish to do away with the social programs that are -- [inaudible] that serve public education, public health and other benefits to the public. and then there's a third group within the council for national policy which are the operatives, and they have a very sophisticated understanding of the american electoral system. especially the state level which is something that the democratic party lost over the last decade or two. and is so they've worked at a

state level to be very effective, they looked at statehouses and put a lot of energy into winning statehouses across the country. they then worked with the courts to create legal structures that benefit their political ambitions. and another part of their operation is to work intrinsically inside evangelical and fundamentalist churches. so we're talking about putting voter guides in the church bulletin, we're talking about downloading entire church directories to use for electioneering. to the extent that americans expect a separation of church and state, they would disagree. >> so, and this is in a way an unfair question, but i'm going to ask anyway just because not everybody in the audience has read the books yet. but could you both give me the kind of incredibly abbreviated chronology of this person or

this organization just so so we start -- and you don't need to go, tom, first -- [laughter] but his political career and then the cnp, how do we get from 1981 or maybe 1967 to 2019 just so people understand the arc but in, you know, 500 words or less. go. [laughter] >> you know, hold on a second, i brought something with me that helps explain mike pence. i don't know if you guys can see this right here. this is corn seed from his boyhood, the backyard of his boyhood home in columbus, indiana, the end of hall creek boulevard. this is where i started with him, and it helps explain him so well. whenever he was deflecting questions about whether he would run for president, he would always say, his throwaway line was i'm just a kid from a small town in southern indiana who grew up with a cornfield in his

backyard. and i would hear that as somebody as a coastal, right, as somebody from baltimore, and i would think to myself it's like a john mellencamp video, right? [laughter] can and then i went to columbus, indiana, and it was not like a john mellencamp video. it's a very distinguished town. it's kind of an oasis in there. and i always wondered why is he doing that? why is he misrepresenting his town? we drove, in february 2018, my family was with me, my wife and daughter x two of his old neighbors. we were taking a tour of the city. and we drove to his house, and there was a cornfield behind his old boyhood home, and i couldn't believe it. i'd never believed there was an actual cornfield. and the answer was that he had lived in a family that was the suburban dream of the 1950s and the 1960s always moving into the newest subdevelopment that was eating into the cornfield around columbus,

indiana. this is mike pence. this is his style of misdirection, the political style of misdirection. and this is why, this is partially how i came to these findings that he is not a theocrat, for instance. i think there's a lot of people that would like to see him as a theocrat, including himself. he likes to let people see him as a theocrat. some of his sources told me this. you know, that's why his daughter wrote -- i suspect -- it's why his daughter wrote an op-ed in the washington times saying my book was an attack on people of faith everywhere. because once you start to peel away at the mask, he has to put it back up. this is functionally e who he is. he's constantly changing, and i saw this in 1988, he runs for congress for the first time. he runs as a newt gingrich-trained republican. he drops that facade later, starts campaigning for pat buchanan, supporting pat buchanan in the 1992 race against george w. bush. later drops that, becomes a kris

can-right guy, become -- crisp chan-right guys, becomes a tea partier after that, drops that. like so many things with donald trump, he moves so fast and so chaotic that he exposes a lot of the, we'll call it the hypocrisy. the old indiana republican chairman use to say there's hypocrisy and high-pocrisy. and the rapidity, the rapidness of that change becomes apart when he flips on a dime from being a quasi-technocratic establishment republican to a neo-populist, you know, demagogue republican. that's who this -- i mean, this is who mike pence is. >> and i should say that my last two books were about anti-nazi resistance movements in berlin and occupied paris, so i never really intended to come back and write about this part of the country. but i felt compelled to given

recent developments. so i found that the down ill for national policy -- council for national policy had its roots in texas, and it was at a time when, actually, i was growing up in oklahoma, and all of the protestant denominations that were in town were gradually liberalizing. civil rights movement was going on, the women's movement was going on, and they were all adjusting. including the southern baptist convention. they were liberalizing their attitudes on a number of fronts, and two gentlemen from texas who might be gentlemen objected, and they undertook a kind of campaign within the southern baptist convention to purge moderates and instill hard-liners who would roll back the southern baptists on these social issues. and in 1980 these groups joined forces in that's with ronald ray began and found -- ronald reagan and found a way to present reagan as a fundamentalist

candidate, which he wasn't really in terms of his identity. and they got behind reagan and pushed, along with the southern strategy, and that opened up a new era in american politics. in 1981, the following year, the council for national policy was formed with the fundamentalists, the reaganites, the oil interests from texas, oklahoma and louisiana. and it grew over the years trying to develop strategy that could deal with the fact that they were losing momentum in public opinion. americans are increasingly learning that having homosexual family members anding neighbors is not a threat to their security. there are all kinds of things that are favor by public opinion such as background checks for firearms, and they kept pushing back to see how they could manipulate the electoral system to overcome the trends in public

opinion. so they kept striking deals with national politicians who would then back away from their social and economic prescriptions. and 2016 was where it really all came together. they liked mike pence as a presidential candidate but felt he wasn't quite ready yet. they'd been grooming him, as tom said, for years. they got behind ted cruz and pushed hard. but cruz lost the primary, and then they had a moment of crisis. and i describe it in the book, june 21, 2016, they invited a thousand fundamentalist leaders from all over the country to sodom and gomorrah, new york city -- [laughter] 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 and the nominations, which they've advanced very rapidly, one was an evangelical council that was dominated by members of the council for national policy. so trump, who is formerly a presbyterian, has a evangelical advisory council without any representatives of catholicism, judaism, even mainline protestants. it's all evangelical and fundamentalists. and one of them, tony perkins -- a fellow oklahoman and president of the council for national policy -- was given the ability to write much of the social platform for the republican national convention where conversion therapy is alluded to and many other social issues that would be out of step with the national current.

so we're reaching a kind of moment of truth in the coming year where they would see whether their strategy will reach fruition and give them another four years of court appointments or whether it will be contested in the public sphere. >> so, i mean, to sort of follow up on that for both of you, you know, what does america look like if the vision of the council for national policy is realized, and maybe a relates question -- related question, what does america look like if mike pence is president and has his way on policies over the next four or eight years? what does that america look like, you know, for good or nil? >> yeah. and it's the, i mean, it's a timely question, obviously, given current events. you know, pence, there's a couple places where -- from my reporting and my research on

this, one, it would not be, it would not be strident in the way that the council, as i suspect the council for national policy would like. and part of that is because there comes a point in pence's career where his ambition and winning the office in his own right predominates all other thing, including ideology. and it's about the time when the cnp starts pushing him in 2008. this is where you start to see his tactics change. there's a couple of baseline points for this and there's some evidence. in 2015, you know, ironically enough, the big event where he basically gets painted as the face of anti-gay bigotry across the nation, this 2015 fight for this religious freedom, anti-gay marriage law in indiana. the funny thing that, that was not his bill. that was pushed by other

lawmakers in the state as a token prize to the religious conservatives in the building because they'd lost the gay marriage fight the year prior. pence had told his advisers the year before -- and a lot of this i report in the book for the first time, it's how we come to the conclusion that he's not a theocrat -- he told his advisers the year before that he didn't want anything to do with the gay marriage battle. he said let's have it decided by the supreme court, i don't want to stick my neck out on it. he did not stick his neck out on it until the very last minute when it looked like this thing was fine and he could deliver a victory to his christian-right base. that's a what he does. there's a signing, a big photo and all this. and then it promptly blows up in his face. n on the george stephanopoulos interview, which if you guys have seen, if you want to understand that breakdown of pence that happened about two

weeks ago with the questions about ukraine, go watch his performance in george stephanopoulos' this week march 30, 2015. the pence thought does not break down like that. not often. he digs in his heels in this moment. he is firm hi with -- he's already made a decision that he is with the christian right on this. he digs in his heels. nobody with change his mind. until he gets a phone call from one of the most important mega-donors inside the republican party, paul singer. paul singer, the new york hedge funder billionaire on par in terms of donations with people like the mercers, the koch brothers, top-level donors, and singer tells him that you won't get any money from me unless you back down. because singer's son is gay. his son has come out a few years

earlier. pence backs down on the issue. that's how i know he's not a theocrat. when it comes to his ambition versus the ideology, the ambition wins out. same is true with trump. i'll give you a funny example. in the 2000 debates, i found this video and went back, the old public tv station up in muncie, indiana, and the 2000 debate of mike pence and his opponents, a democrat and an independent, and they asked him where he stood on nafta. and he looks at them and he says, he says, well, i think that nafta might be the only thing that president bill clinton and i agree on. and that's where he stood for 16 years until he joined trump, and then he didn't support nafta anymore. his positions are eminently fungible. that's who he is.

>> but i would add that if he does have a path to the presidency, it will require the partner organizations at the council for national policy -- >> yes. >> and they tend to collect their bills. >> that's true. that's a good point. that's a good point. >> and i think that there are always penalties for politicians who renege on their agreements. so in terms of what they would seek, you can see it very clearly with the judiciary appointments that have been made at record speed including a number of judges for the federal bench who are rated as not qualified by the american bar association. we're talking about the latest appointment. he is 37, he has been appointed to a lifetime position on the federal bench. he has never tried -- he has never prosecuted a case as a lawyer. what he has is his political affiliation. and so, again, these people have been selected because of their

willingness to realize a certain vision. what is that vision? you can see one expression of it with the laws that have been passed in various are states limiting women's choice. you can see it in the attacks and the rollback of support for planned parenthood. you can see it in the support in many area r areas, many states for conversion therapy which which has been condemned by the american medical association as a way that is cruel and inhuman to the gay population. you can see it in the prohibition of transsexuals in the pentagon, in the military. this was an initiative of this movement, and it was against the wishes of the pentagon who said this is not a problem. transsexuals in the military are not a problem. you don't have to fix it. but it was implemented anyway.

you can see it in the rollback of all kinds of environmental regulations and the protection of the public's interest in clean air and water. you can also see it in the taxes and the way the structure of the economy is being changed to create a massive public debt that will be inherited by our children and our grandchildren in order to provide tax cuts to the top 1%. so they've shown us plenty of evidence of what kind of society they envisioning. and i can only say that in another four years it would be ec we dieted, and the transformation -- expedited and the transformation could be likely complete, and it would be a different america than the one we've known in the past. >> so i'm going to ask one more quick question, but i encourage to line up behind the mics because we're going to go to the audience q&a in a minute. anne, i want to read you something you wrote, and then i

have a question that relates to what we just said. you write: the council for national policy and its partners have spent over four decades studying their audience and mastering the written and unwritten rules of politics. its moralists have little regard for the rights of minorities and its strategists have no respect for majority rule. if it's fully realized, their combination of theocracy and plutocracy could result in dystopia for those who fall outside their circle. the question i want to is ask is from my perspective, and i think there's been a lot written about this, the plutocracy part of it has succeeded extraordinarily. and in that, you know, you can point to specific, you know, issues like transgenders serving in the military where there's been some pushback. but broadly speaking, you know, acceptance of lgbt folks has proceeded at a pace incredibly dramatically in this country, and sexual license and openness

continues to proceed. but taxes are down, regulations are down. so i guess, i guess the question is, is that version of the story -- am i wrong about the sort of theocracy part failing? and the other question is do the cnp folks care about the theocracy part, or do they mostly care about the plutocracy part? >> they care deeply about it, and i think they've been remarkably successful. again, going back to this idea of separation of church and state, what was that about for our founding fathers? it was about everybody's right to believe or not believe as they chose. as long as they abided by the law. the law of the land. what you had last week was our secretary of state putting on a state department home page a christian leader. what kind of message does that send to other parts of the population? they're not part of our nation if they're not christian? what, they go and fight in our

wars, they pay our taxes, they participate in every aspect of our lives, but aen non-christian has no rights as a citizen or isn't represented by our federal government? that's not what i learned in civics class. and you see this permeating every branch of the federal government. you see the health and human services being staffed by people who are bringing their own religious-based opinions about who should get services and who shouldn't. that should be based on citizenship. again, you just go through every, every aspect of our country, and you now have a new set of regulations involving denial of service which i believe is discussed here in texas. where somebody who is working in the medical or the legal or other fields can deny service to somebody based on their sexual

orientation. in my book, that is not religious, but it's part of a theocracy approach. but to me, that's un-american. [applause] >> so go to -- let's go to the audience and you, sir. >> thank you for coming here, really appreciate that. i have a question for both of y'all. anne mentioned about donald trump who's been appointing judges who have never tried a case in their life. well, what do you say to somebody who says, well, so what? for 50 years there have been unelected judges who have never

mean, the irony of this is when pence has his own personal conversion experience in 1978 -- [audio difficulty] the evangelical part of the country over these issues. so there's significant anger other it. and i think that, you know, when you look at anne's research, what she's pointing to is the

harnessing of it. you can't harness a group as a political force if it doesn't exist. and it's there and it's to tent. poe tent, you know? now, the flip side of that, and i'll tell you this, i didn't write this extensively in the book, but, you know, i got this during the reporting of the book, the flip side of this is watch mike pence and karen pence as they talk about gay marriage as an issue. because according to at least one family friend that i talked with for this, they're still struggling with it internally as a family as their kids -- it's a generational divide -- their kids tell them they need to back down on the issue. so their three children tell them it's time the back down on this. and there's an internal debate amongst the pence family on how to handle it. and that's part of the reason i think you see pence not as strident as he used to be on this issue. >> and if you read my book,

you'll see that there are passages where i really do push back against the coastal elites as a native

>> and, again, i'm afraid for those of you who read my book, there's a lot about the money. i pent lots and lots -- spent lots and lots of time going through federal records of who's funding what and the cross-funding. and that's where you get a lot of the action. one of the main mares in this field is the devos -- players in this field is the devos family, as in betsy, as in am in michigan. and they set up a kind of cross-funding relationship with the koch brothers where alex is one of the -- alec is one of the parties involved in this. and alec has been very important.

i'm glad you raised it, because that has brought together state legislators and corporate interests who pay their bills for june -- junkets and introduce legislation that benefit the corporate interests. the legislators go home and those in states with legal systems can pass these bills and create legal precedents for them to spread to other states. so it's been a highly, highlyfective mechanism for introducing legislation on a state level. is it illegal? i don't know. but one issue is that the democrats had no response to it until relatively recently. [audio difficulty] >> and get your reaction and thoughts about it. it seems to me that my children and my grandchildren and all that generation, all those generations are way beyond the

gay issue. it'ser relevant to them -- it's irrelevant to them for the most part. and not just in austin but, you know, where i come from on the gulf coast of texas which is pretty redneck. [laughter] it's just not an issue. and birth control's not an issue. abortion is rarely an issue with them. so i think your theocracy, the theocracy component of the right wing, i think, is falling -- will fall apart politically. and i'd like your thought abouts about that. >> i see it as a race against time because, as you say, you know, our young people have grown up with, you know, gay people around them and members of their family, their friends, their communities. as you say, it's not only not an

issue, there are so many people that are beloved and productive and, you know, that's their world. and so as that generation, i hope, comes to vote in increasing numbers in electoral terms, this movement will have less of a leg to stand on. this is why i think they're so set on expediting these lifetime court appointments. now, usually these federal bench appointments are for older, distinguished people from the legal profession in their 40s and 50s. we're getting a whole batch of them in their 30s for a lifetime appointment. so that is going to be a way of consolidating power within the three branches of government that's not going to go away with elections. >> go to the gentleman in the way back, because i know you've been in line. >> hi. >> is that working? >> can you hear me? >> yeah. >> tom, i apologize, i haven't written the book --

>> no, i'm sorry, you can't ask a question. [laughter] >> i wondered if you had any anecdotes about mike pence, i've heard stories about where he refuses to be alone in a room with a woman even in the white house and what maybe brought that on for him? [laughter] >> and, tom, can i just append to that, because it's a good story. can you tell the story of the radio archives? >> oh, yes -- >> because i want to get that -- >> but first, mike pence and women. >> well, you know -- [laughter] these are actually, believe it or not, these are actually tied together. the -- he doesn't start the billy graham role, as i say, right, he doesn't start doing this until he moves to washington, okay? and how to we know this? because when he was on the radio on the weekends in indiana, he used to have lunch alone every saturday with a woman who was not his wife. a lovely woman. is and they had great conversations. that's kay shepard, and she

helped me with the book. pence changed the first time he went to washington. he has these -- he's very good at burying his past selves and having people buy into it. and how does he do that? well, one way is by hiding the tapes of all of his radio shows from the '90s. i myself and a number of other folks have gone and been looking for these for years now -- >> me too. [laughter] >> and -- right? my understanding is that his old producer left the radio station in 2017 and took 'em to the lobby shop, lobbying shop run by his former chief of staff where he sits on them. i suspect -- i don't, i mean, from what few radio tapes we have seen of his radio show in the '90s, he sounds like a james dobson character of that moment. but again, this is just a marker

in time for him. i suspect one of the reasons they don't want these out there is because you would have a better barometer of who he was. have a better sense of who he is and how he's changed. yeah, i mean, i would love to see them. i think it'd be incredible. i think you'd also pick up on something else. he's very good at listening, and this is how he develops himself as a politician. it's a key moment, and this is how he cultivates donors. people who give money love to be heard. >> love to talk about themselves. >> yeah. >> i'd like to add that this is a characteristic of this whole movement in terms of covering their tracks. because even in the two years when i was researching and writing the book, i would see web sites where they would put out a kind of extreme position, one of these organizations corresponding to the council e on national policy. and i'd go back a month later and it had disappeared. the council for national policy a secret organization even

though it is a tax-exempt organization contributing to so-called public welfare and education. they don't publish their roster, they don't open their meetings, they say they have publications, but they don't have publications. so research nerds or like tom and myself rely on things like the way back machine where you can archived web sites from the past, but it takes a lot of digging to do this kind of work. and you have to ask if they're covering their tracks this aggressively, what do they have to hide? >> all right. >> [inaudible] bought into trump and his ideology and putting all the chips in his corner to advance their interest. theoretically, if we have a different president in 2021, where do you see both of these groups going? if they're untethered from him and they've pushed the chips in his corner, what do they go back to? i know you're not mind readers,

but where would you imagine they'd take their ideology from there? >> the classic elasticity question we talk about when things snap back to normal. i don't think they do. one of the things you see in pence's career is that he's picking up on the populist side of the split inside the republican party with people like pat buchanan in 1992. look, pence knows that that's where the future of the party is, and that space you can't -- you might not be able to win a general election with it, but you absolutely cannot win a primary without it. so that's what he's always trying to do. this obsequious withness we see from him, i think it was called -- [inaudible] that's because he knows that's where the party is. there's no, these, like, never trump fantasy schemes that are out there, i mean, i watched them all through 2016.

i mean, i'm old enough to remember when tom rickets was the never trump leader. it's not that long ago. i mean, pence is fundamentally where the rest of the party is, and, you know, it doesn't take much to watch jeff flake and bob corker, even mitt romney, people flame out when they oppose this. trump's control is via the base, and i don't think -- it will not snap back to what it used to be for, you know, for a very long time. >> i would also expect the people in the council for national policy to keep doubling down on media. and that's a big part of my book. i look at the way that people in the midwest and southwest have lost countless hometown newspapers over the last 20 years, and those papers used to be what told us what was going on in the world because they had ap stories on the front page and high school basketball scores on the back, you know? that was, that was part of our information diet. we watched the network news at

dinner time -- we certainly did. and so we were connected to a national network of fact-based journalism. and when that starts to go away, through professional news, then an informed electorate goes away too. and everyone becomes more susceptible to manipulation by some of these media outlets x. now it started out with the radio, and we're started about people back in the day. it's expanded to fundamentalists broadcasting on television, it's expanded to book publishing, countless bestsellers where you can learn all about the rapture. it's expanded to countless online platforms as well as all of the highly publicized facebook memes and a whole world of parallel apps that go onto cell phones and download people's entire directory for political use without them being aware of it.

so if you control information, you control the country. and i feel that many people have been asleep at the wheel while this has been going on. [applause] >> well, we have to wrap it up. finish i want to, again, thank tom and anne for being up here and for, i think, doing the incredibly important work of research and reporting and writing on what's really happening. just a reminder, they will be signing their books in the tent, so please buy them and thanks again to c-span and the texas book festival. and thank you to you and to our authors. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> and in just a few minutes, you'll hear from former u.s. ambassador to the united nations for the obama administration, samantha power, on her new memoir. booktv on c-span2 is live all weekend at the texas book festival. check your program guide and follow along behind the scenes on social media @booktv for more schedule information. >> while we wait, here's a portion of tonight's "after words" program with republican senator rand paul of kentucky discussing his latest book, "the case against socialism." >> guest: see, in the abstract they said we're going to have fairness, but the thing is you have a conception of fairness, i have a conception of fairness, representative omar might have a conception of fairness. but for her to inning voc hers on us if we disagree with her, she's not going to sell us her

ideas, she has to send the police, basically x. this is where it breaks down because -- and this is the, i think, why maybe it's become popular and the idea of fairness, is they can fake fairness with things like charity and being your brother's keeper. i believe we should be our brother's keeper. i believe in christianity and the idea that we should take careover of our people. but that has nothing really to do with government, you know? they believe it and they conflate it and they say, oh, well, charity is if i come to your house and take your money and give it to somebody else. it's not charity when the government comes. it's also very uncharitable with the way the government does it. ultimately, if you want a little bit of socialism, the violence from government may be tolerable. you want a little bit more, you're going to have a little more state violation are. but if you really want to take the property, and when mao came to take the farms or stalin, truly there is a point at which people rebel, and the only way you can get it is