Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

Robert Mercer, the reclusive white supremacist and hedge fund billionaire. To say Mercer is a mysterious figure in Republican politics would be an understatement. Despite his being one of the most successful hedge fund executives on Wall Street and one of the biggest funders of right-wing causes, few people know his name. Mercer is famously media shy, and according to the Wall Street Journal, he once told a coworker that he preferred cats to humans.9 If Scaife was newspapers and Murdoch was television, then Mercer was the one who took right-wing disinformation into the digital age. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were at the center of Trump’s rise. For years, they were Steve Bannon’s chief patrons. According to some reports, the Mercers helped connect Bannon and Trump. They gave boatloads of money to Trump’s campaigns and to outside groups supporting him. The Mercers were also major investors in Cambridge Analytica, the controversial Trump campaign data firm that stole data from tens of millions of Facebook users. But beyond all the fund-raising and connections, the Mercers’ biggest contribution to Trump’s victory had little to do with Trump. In 2011, after a meeting with Bannon and Andrew Breitbart, the Mercers agreed to invest ten million dollars in Breitbart, the alt-right news outlet. The Mercers’ check came with one contingency: Bannon must join the board of the publication. Within a year, Andrew Breitbart had passed away, and Bannon was running the show. Under Bannon...