Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

“the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Bannon had a starker, more aggressive take on this idea: He believed the Democrats were simply using American minorities for their own political ends. He was convinced that the social compact that emerged after the civil rights movement, where Democrats benefited from African American votes in exchange for government aid, was not born out of any moral enlightenment, but instead out of shrewd calculation.

Race realists believe, for example, that black Americans score lower on standardized tests not because the tests are skewed, or because of the long history of oppression and prejudice that blacks must overcome, but because they’re inherently less intelligent than white Americans. It’s a pseudoscientific notion, embraced by white supremacists, with roots in the centuries-old “scientific racism” that underlies, among other disasters of human history, slavery, apartheid, and the Holocaust. The alt-right, led by Bannon and Breitbart, adopted race realism as a cornerstone philosophy.

Cambridge Analytica began studying not only overt racism but racism in its many other incarnations. When we think about racism, we often think of overt hatred. But racism can persist in different ways. Racism can be aversive, where a person consciously or subconsciously avoids a racial group (e.g., gated communities, sexual and romantic avoidance, etc.), and racism can be symbolic, where a person holds negative evaluations of a racial group (e.g., stereotypes, double standards, etc.). However, because the label “racism” can hold such social stigma in modern America, we found that white people often ignore or discount their internalized prejudices and react strongly to any inference that they hold such beliefs.

our research, we saw that white fragility prevented people from confronting their latent prejudices. This cognitive dissonance also meant that subjects would often amplify their responses expressing positive statements toward minorities in an effort to satiate their self-concept of “not being racist.”

BANNON ENVISIONED A VEHICLE to help white racists move past all this and become liberated “free thinkers.”

To him, they were revealing their true selves, unfiltered by a “political correctness” that was preventing them from speaking these “truths” in public. It was through the process of reading these forums that Bannon realized he could harness them and their anonymous swarms of resentment and harassment.

The firm started this journey by identifying a series of cognitive biases that it hypothesized would interact with latent racial bias. Over the course of many experiments, we concocted an arsenal of psychological tools that could be deployed systematically via social media, blogs, groups, and forums.

People reacted strongly to the notion that “liberals” were seeking new ways to mock and shame them, along with the idea that political correctness was a method of persecution.

This framing of political correctness as an identity threat catalyzed a “boomerang” effect in people where counternarratives would actually strengthen, not weaken, the prior bias or belief.

if you could frame racialized views through the lens of identity prior to exposure to a counternarrative, that counternarrative would be interpreted as an attack on identity instead.

Later, when Donald Trump was aggressively criticized in the media for racist or misogynist statements, these critiques likely created a similar effect, where the criticism of Trump strengthened the resolve of supporters who would internalize the critique as a threat to their very identity.

What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

Cambridge Analytica started asking subjects if the thought of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant made them feel uncomfortable. For subjects who denied discomfort with the idea, a prompt would then follow: “Did you feel like you had to say that?” Subjects would be given permission to change their answers, and many did. After the Facebook data was collected, CA began exploring ways of taking this further by pulling photos of daughters of white men in order to pair them with photos of black men—to show white men what political correctness “really looked like.”

the just-world hypothesis (JWH). This is a cognitive bias where some people rely on a presumption of a fair world: The world is a fair place where bad things “happen for a reason” or will be offset by some sort of “moral balancing” in the universe. We found that people who displayed the JWH bias were, for example, more prone to victim-blaming

Maybe it wasn’t racist to suggest that minorities were not able to create their own success, subjects were told—maybe it was just realistic.

CA then discovered that for those with evangelical worldviews in particular, a “just world” exists because God rewards people with success if they follow his rules. In other words, people who live good lives won’t get preexisting conditions, and they will succeed in life, even if they are black. Cambridge Analytica began feeding these cohorts narratives with an expanded religious valence. “God is fair and just, right? Wealthy people are blessed by God for a reason, right? Because He is fair. If minorities complain about receiving less, perhaps there is a reason—because He is fair. Or are you daring to question God?”

This gave CA a way to cultivate more punitive views toward “the other.” If the world is fair and governed by a just God, then refugees are suffering for a reason. Over time, subjects would increasingly discount examples of valid refugee claims under U.S. law and instead focus on how and why the claimants should be punished. And in some cases, the stronger the refugee claim, the harsher the responses. The targets were less and less concerned with hypothetical refugees and more concerned with maintaining the consistency of...

For Bannon’s free thinkers, race reality was not only becoming their reality, it was becoming God’s reality—a connection with a long history in America. From the time slaves were first brought to America, preachers drew from the book of Ephesians to justify the practice, quoting the line “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” as evidence that slave ownership was godly. In the early nineteenth century, Ep...

In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” fueled racial fear and tensions in order to shift white voters’ allegiance from the Democrats to the GOP.

In his 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly invoked the “welfare queen”—a black woman who supposedly was able to buy a Cadillac on government assistance.

In 1988, George H. W. Bush’s campaign ran the infamous Willie Horton ad, terrifying white voters with visions of wild-haired black criminals running amok.

Steve Bannon aimed to affirm the ugliest biases in the American psyche and convince those who possessed them that they were the victims, that they had been forced ...

Major figures in history, he said, were artists: Franco and Hitler were painters, while Stalin, Mao, and bin Laden were all poets. He understood that movements adopt a new aesthetic for society. Bannon asked why dictators always lock up the poets and artists first. Because they are often artists themselves. And for Bannon, this movement was primed to become his great performance.

The exploitation of cognitive biases, for Bannon, was simply a means of “de-programming” his targets from the “conditioning” they had endured growing up in a vapid and meaningless society. Bannon wanted his targets to “discover themselves” and “become who they really were.”

By targeting people with specific psychological vulnerabilities, the firm victimized them into joining what was nothing more than a cult led by false prophets, where reason and facts would have little effect on its new followers, digitally isolated as they now were from inconvenient narratives.

spring 2014, just two years before any Russian disinformation efforts hit the U.S. presidential election, there wasn’t anything innately suspicious about these Russians beyond the typical bread-and-butter shadiness that the firm engaged in.

Lukoil was a major force in the global economy—the largest privately owned company in Putin’s kleptocracy—but I couldn’t see an obvious link between a Russian oil company and CA’s work in the United States.

Cambridge Analytica was merely a front-facing brand for American clients that was entirely staffed by SCL personnel.) “SCL retains a number of retired intelligence and security agency officers from Israel, USA, UK, Spain & Russia each with extensive technical and analytical experience,” the memo read. “Our experience shows that in many cases utilizing social media or ‘foreign’ publications to ‘expose’ an opponent is often more effectual than using potentially biased local media channels.” The memo discussed “infiltrating” opposition campaigns using “intelligence nets” to obtain “damaging information” and creating scaled networks of “Facebook and Twitter accounts to build credibility and cultivate followers.” For many of SCL’s clients, this was a standard offer—private espionage, stings, bribes, extortion, infiltrations, honey traps, and disinformation spread through fake accounts on social media. For the right price, SCL was willing to do whatever it took to win an election. And now, armed with even more extensive data sets and AI capabilities, and millions invested, the newly formed Cambridge Analytica was looking to take this further.

Labeled “Election: Inoculation,” the material described how to spread rumors and disinformation to sway election results. Nix played videos of emotional voters convinced that the upcoming Nigerian election would be rigged. “We made them think that,” he said with delight. The next set of slides described how SCL had worked to fix elections in Nigeria, complete with videos of voters saying how worried they were about rumors of violence and upheaval. “And we made them think that too,” Nix said.

CA’s internal psychology team started replicating some of his research from Russia: profiling people who were high in neuroticism and dark-triad traits. These targets were more impulsive and more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, and, with the right kind of nudges, they could be lured into extreme thoughts or behavior.

Sometimes he would blame the victim after losing his temper. “You always make me yell,” he’d say, as if he was not in control of his own voice. What disturbed me most was when he denied a tantrum even as I was still reeling from the effects. There is something quite powerful in being told, flatly, that the thing that upset you never happened; eventually you start to worry that you’ve gone mad. “You need to grow up and be less sensitive,” Nix would say. “I can’t trust you if you keep telling me that I lost my temper.”

CA’s client list eventually grew into a who’s who of the American right wing. The Trump and Cruz campaigns paid more than $5 million apiece to the firm. The U.S. Senate campaigns of Roy Blunt of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas became clients. And, of course, there was the losing House bid of Art Robinson, the Oregon Republican who collected piss and church organs.

John Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1 million to explore how to increase militarism in American youth. Bolton was worried that millennials were a “morally weak” generation that would not want to go to war with Iran or other “evil” countries.

One project was described in CA correspondence as a “voter disengagement” (i.e., voter suppression) initiative targeting African Americans. Republican clients were worried about the growing minority vote, especially in relation to their aging white base, and were looking for ways to confuse, demotivate, and disempower people of color.

In our invasion of America, we were purposefully activating the worst in people, from paranoia to racism. I immediately wondered if this was what Stanley Milgram felt like watching his research subjects.

I was now working for extremists who wanted to build their very own dystopia in America and Europe.

In the end, we were creating a machine to contaminate America with hate and cultish paranoia, and I could no longer ignore the immorality and illegality of it all. I did not want to be a collaborator.

Cambridge Analytica had been hired by a group of Nigerian billionaires who were worried that if Buhari won the election, he would revoke their oil and mineral exploration rights, decimating a major source of their income.

highly sensitive material about political opponents—which may have been hacked or stolen—somehow ended up in the company’s possession. By gaining access to opposition email accounts, databases, and even private medical records, the firm discovered that Buhari likely had cancer, which was not public knowledge at the time. The use of hacked material was not unique to Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also procured kompromat on the opposition leader of St. Kitts and Nevis, an island nation in the Caribbean.

A number of people left CA right after I quit, reasoning that if the firm had become too sketchy for me, the guy who knew all the secrets, then it was too sketchy, period.

Cummings had obviously read up on Cambridge Analytica, and he asked a lot of questions about how the firm worked. He was interested in creating what he called “the Palantir of politics”—a term I shuddered at after hearing it used so often by Nix. I just rolled my eyes, thinking, Here we go again.

One of the most compelling progressive arguments for Brexit was pretty simple. It was that the European Union tended to favor European—i.e., white—immigrants over those from the Commonwealth nations, who were predominantly people of color. Under EU rules, migrants to Britain from countries like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Austria did not need a visa to work and live in Britain. But migrants from, say, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, or Jamaica were required to undergo extensive screening and difficult immigration procedures.

It was out of this sense of deep unfairness that many people of color—people like Sanni’s friends and family, who were from Pakistan—had no affinity for the EU: They knew what it felt like to have to endure a Kafkaesque immigration system requiring them to prove every ounce of their worth. They knew what it felt like to live in a country that had exploited their ancestors to build itself up but now sent Home Office trucks roving through the neighborhoods of Indian and Pakistani communities, emblazoned with warnings like HERE ILLEGALLY? GO HOME OR FACE ARREST. TEXT HOME TO 78070. Meanwhile, a German or Italian, whose grandfather may very well have taken deadly aim on those battalions of Indians and Nigerians that Britain called into battle, could enter Britain with no questions asked, and then get busy applying for jobs.

it was by identifying this bubbling resentment that the pro-Brexit movement managed to create a counterintuitive alliance between some sections of immigrant communities and cohorts of jingoist Brexiteers who wanted them all to “go home.”

Green Leaves, Out and Proud,

Vote Leave, to be called BeLeave.

The official color for Vote Leave was red, so they needed something different. I said, “Why not use the Pantone colors of the year?”—which in 2016 happened to be Serenity blue and Rose Quartz pink. Darren did a mock-up, and I messaged back, “It looks so gay and millennial. Not fascist at all.”

With the hardcore anti-immigration votes already in the bag, the Leave side needed to secure only a small percentage of more liberal-minded voters to win. Data was the key to targeting those voters.

this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica bypass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.