... liberals tend to be looking for common ground, but I don't believe the right wing in this country wants common ground. To liberals and people who believe in secular government – I say forget about the fundamentalists. Appeal to the 60 or 70 percent of the American people who aren't fundamentalists – who may have lots of religious beliefs, but who also believe in secular government. Don't waste time trying to persuade people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. You're not going to persuade those people of anything.

Susan Jacoby, a fervent believer in the separation of church and state, recently spoke with BuzzFlash about America's historical roots in secularism, or freedom of religion. Her latest book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, is an exploration of the rich history of our secular country, a nation conceived in the "Age of Reason," in response to European religious oppression. As she argues so persuasively, our American revolution, our heroic and enlightened founders, and our unique Constitution left behind the old European model of governments founded on a fixed religious hierarchy and belief in the divine rights of monarchs. America was founded to allow religious thought and practice, not to endorse a single form of it. Trouble is, some of our most powerful leaders today would have us march right back to that pre-revolutionary, "divinely inspired" model of governing.

Susan Jacoby is director of the Center for Inquiry, Metro New York, as well as an independent scholar, author of seven books, a respected journalist and a Guggenheim Fellow.

BuzzFlash: The chapter in your book entitled "Reason Embattled" is of special interest to BuzzFlash, because we've covered Antonin Scalia's religious outlook quite a bit. In that chapter, you refer to a speech Supreme Court Justice Scalia gave at the Chicago Divinity School, which went largely unnoticed by the media. More recently, he has been stampeding around the country, making speeches to synagogues, saying that Jews would be safer in a Christian nation. At a recent Knights of Columbus meeting, he proclaimed that no one should be afraid to be a fool for Christ. Amidst all his proselytizing, you bring up the point that he uses this rationale as an argument for capital punishment – that this is a Christian nation and the United States – as a Christian nation – shouldn't question the notion of capital punishment because it's really divine dictum, in a way.

Susan Jacoby: Well, actually he's more general than that. His argument is simply this: that capital punishment is lawful because all just governments derive their power from God.

That's number one, ignoring the fact that our Constitution says nothing about God, but ascribes powers to "we the people." And so the argument, by extension, for a death penalty is simply this: that because God has the power of life and death, and since all just governments derive their power not from the consent of the governed, but from God Himself – and I'm sure Scalia's God is a Himself, not a Herself – therefore, governments, too, should have power over life and death.

Scalia is a devout right-wing Catholic, and one of the things that's mildly interesting about this is the one problem he has with that is the fact that it's been denounced by the pope, who argues exactly the opposite – that only God should have the power of life and death. But I guess that makes Scalia more Catholic than the pope.

But in terms of American government, what is so disturbing is this argument in favor of a public policy – which one can certainly argue about on secular grounds – on the grounds that if God can do it, so too can we, because we get our power of the government from God, according to Scalia.

Your book, Freethinkers, of course, debunks the notion that the Constitution was a document that was written as, let's say, the Ten Commandments – something that was given from God to the founders of this country. They expressly wrote out that this was NOT a divine document, but it was a document of reason and of reasonable men at the time. BuzzFlash is also offering a book on the Founding Fathers and their opinions on the separation of church and state, where it is quite clear that they thought they should be separated. So how does Scalia get away with calling himself a strict constructionist of the Constitution when ...

Somehow that's very interesting, because, in fact, Scalia has often called the Constitution a dead document, meaning that it means exactly what it said when it was written at the time, but no more. And that's why he calls himself a strict constructionist.

But in fact, reading God into the Constitution is the exact opposite of strict constructionism. In fact, leaving God out of the Preamble to the Constitution – it was revolutionary. There had never been a government that legally separated church and state before, and it was very deliberate. The omission of God from the Constitution was debated at all of the state ratifying conventions about the Constitution before and when it was finally ratified.

And the Christian right at the time – the right-wing ministers – were very opposed and predicted that God would smash America for leaving Him out of the document. And by the way, this was a division then, too, between conservative and liberal religion, not only between conservative religious people and freethinkers, because religious dissidents also supported the separation of church and state strongly in the Constitution. And indeed, it was a coalition of freethinkers – of people like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine – and dissident Evangelicals – Baptists, for instance, who were then the minority religion in most states, who joined in this coalition to support the separation of church and state. How far we have come from that.

You quote Justice Scalia in your book as saying, "The more Christian the nation is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral." Abolition of capital punishment has taken hold in what Scalia would view as post-Christian Europe, meaning what Rumsfeld would call "the old Europe." And so there's this common theme between him and Rumsfeld, which is sort of a little footnote – that the old Europe is somehow decadent. And in Scalia's term, it's because it has fallen out of the fundamentalist religious sphere of influence. And to Rumsfeld, it has fallen out of the military powers' sphere of influence. And the United States is a God-fearing Christian nation, and therefore we believe in capital punishment, or at least Scalia does.

There are a whole lot of Christians who don't believe in capital punishment. In fact, it's a very strong strain in Christian churches. Those who believe in capital punishment in a religious sense are the right-wing Christians. And, by the way, there are a good many extremely right-wing Jews, on the right wing of Judaism, who also believe in capital punishment. This is not a divide between Christian and non-Christian. It's a divide within religion as well as between religious people and freethinkers.

Your book is subtitled "The History of American Secularism." My next question is this: we have a president who says he was chosen by the divine power to rule, and that he told Bob Woodward that he – his source of guidance and inspiration is a father...

... A higher father.

A higher father than George Bush the first.

Right.

And although he's toned it down a little recently, post-election, until then he was convinced that his decisions were correct because they were divinely inspired. Rather than that he was responsible to the people, he was responsible to God, and God's guidance would guide the American nation: divine guidance would be Bush's inspiration. We thought that in the '60s or '70s, America seemed, if anything, to be accelerating into a more secular nation through technology, through the emancipation of women, through civil rights. And now, as Mark Crispin Miller says, we have an administration that goes back to basically pre-Enlightenment.

I think that's right. We really need to think about this not in terms of any contrast with the '60s, but in a much larger time frame. And I think the difference now, and why George Bush is a really unique figure in American history, is there have been lots of presidents who were devout believers in God. But there has never been a president, before, who set himself up as the leader or the spokesman for one religious faction in the country.

And I think a really good comparison in terms of attitudes toward God and the role God plays in public rhetoric and public decisions really is with Abraham Lincoln. He talked about God a lot. And one of the points he made over and over again was that both Northerners and Southerners prayed to the same God supposedly – but the Northern God told the people in the North at the time that it was right to go to war to end slavery, and the Southern God told Southerners that God Himself supported slavery, and it was their right to go to war to uphold that divinely inspired institution.

And right there is the quandary and the dilemma and the wrongness of citing God as a final authority for public policy, because what we all know is that whatever one believes about God, God speaks to people in different voices, and darned if that voice usually isn't the voice of what we already think.

That's the problem of citing God as a justification for capital punishment or war. You close down any public discourse when you do that because, presumably, people who take their inspiration from their vision of God are convinced that they know the will of God. And even though their neighbor may know the will of a completely different God, you just – you close down any discussion, when God is appealed to as the sort of president-in-chief.

Well, your book is entitled Freethinkers. But to the right wing of the Republican Party, which is the faction that's in charge of the White House and the Executive Branch and Congress now, freethinking is almost heretical. Instead we have group think. We support the nation, the homeland, the fatherland. We support the war whether it's right or wrong. A recent poll indicated that 66 percent of Republicans said they would support the United States in a war whether the war was right or wrong. Freethinking individualism, thoughts and reasoning outside of group think, are now branded as unpatriotic. And yet when the Constitution was created at the time of the revolutionary period, it was a vote against the very concept of group think, of monarchy, and was a radical recalibration of government to the people themselves deciding what form of government they want. Now, we're really back to the monarchy type of structure, where decisions come down from up high and are considered unchallengeable.

There are a lot of reasons for that. They don't all have to do with the rise of religious fundamentalism. One of the questions today – and I'm asked this a lot – is if fundamentalists are a much larger group of people in America than in any other developed country. By most standards, you define a fundamentalist as someone, whether Christian or Jewish or Muslim, who believes the literal interpretation of what their sacred scripture is – that the world was created in seven days, or that you get to have sex with a whole lot of virgins if you die for Allah, for instance. The fundamentalist is someone who believes in the absolute sacredness and unalterability of his text. Probably that minority in America is between about one-fifth and one-third, which leaves two-thirds of people who aren't fundamentalists.

So why do fundamentalists have such influence? Well, one answer for that is that, by very virtue of the intensity of their religious beliefs, they care more about their issues than a lot of more secular people, and they do more to see that their influence is felt.

Most people who are freethinkers or secularists or liberal religious thinkers don't spend their whole day thinking about God and how every decision in government accords with their religion. But fundamentalists do. That makes them much better organized, much better disciplined and goal-oriented in both a specific and a general way than more secular people tend to be. And I think that has to change.

I think the reluctance of Democrats to come out and defend the separation of church and state strongly is lamentable. I don't agree with those people who say the Democrats have to make themselves more like Republicans, and talk about God more. No, that doesn't do any good. I think, by the way, one of the reasons George Bush appealed to people, whether they agree with him or not, is that he is perfectly honest about what he is in terms of his religious and political beliefs. The Democrats, by contrast – many of them tend to soft-pedal what they really think about things like the separation of church and state. And it doesn't work to pretend to be something you're not.

Well, isn't there a paradox – the nation was created to embrace secularism, to embrace individuality, to embrace the will of the people ...

And religious freedom – don't forget that.

And religious freedom.

And that's a very important part of it, too.

And to keep the government from imposing a particular viewpoint upon people. In this case, we seem to be seeing in Antonin Scalia and in George W. Bush,that they want the federal government to impose a certain perspective – a fundamentalist religious perspective on the population as a whole.

Right. This policy is right because God says it's right. I was on a radio show with a very prominent conservative commentator named Michael Medved, who's an Orthodox Jew. And on this show, a caller called in and said, "You know, I'm praying for you, Miss Jacoby, so you'll accept Jesus and you won't, you know, go to hell." And I said on the air – I said how patronizing that is, how typical this is. I said, wouldn't anybody of any religion be offended if I said I was hoping that they would see the light and become an atheist?

And Michael Medved said, "I know." He said he was Jewish and people came up to him at book signings – Christians – and said, "You know, you're a great guy and I agree with what you say. But I'm praying that you'll accept the Lord Jesus." He said, "I'm not offended by that."

Well, you know, he ought to be offended by it. It really amazes me, for instance, to see these male, conservative Jews acting like the fundamentalist Christians are their very best friends. The whole Jewish success story in America arises from America's unique separation of church and state. And Jews would be nowhere in this country if fundamentalist Christians had been writing the Constitution. If people – if George Bush is thinking he'd written the Constitution, we'd just see just how far Jews would have gotten in American society.

It seems the fundamental conflict here historically is that either we are a nation that embraces diversity and finds our strength in diversity, or we are a nation that gains strength from uniformity in belief in a divine God, and that the divine God is guiding our government forward, as Bush and Scalia believe.

Right.

Is George Bush just the fundamentalist Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden in terms of believing that he's – and he let it slip shortly after 9/11 – leading a Crusade? Is the president accountable to the people of the United States, or only to God? Bush says – maybe he implies it, or we infer – that he's positioned himself as being somewhat Christ-like – that he is an instrument of God, and that God is speaking through him and acting through him. And that's a tremendous difference from, as you said, Abraham Lincoln, who felt humbled before God.

It was Lincoln who famously said, "I'm not so concerned about whether God is on our side, as to whether we are on God's side."

You know, the God-is-on-our-side philosophy is a very dangerous philosophy. One of the great ironies of today is that we've seen fundamentalist Islam. We've seen those planes being flown into the World Trade Center. We've seen the destructive results of the feeling that God is endorsing particular kinds of political acts. And I think it's really important to realize that this really, truly is not about whether this is a religious nation or not. America was a Christian people at its founding. America is still predominantly Christian, though not necessarily predominantly the kind of Christian George Bush is.

But there's a difference between the people and their individual religious beliefs, and the government. And that is really important. It is why I keep harping on it, as they say. Bill Moyers said to me in an interview – he said, "You've got a bee in your bonnet." I do have a bee in my bonnet. And the inability to distinguish between people's beliefs and the government and the leadership of the government is the problem that the leadership of George W. Bush and the Christian right in Congress poses today. It's fine to have people believing all of the things they want to believe. But to be putting those beliefs into governmental policy is another matter entirely, and they don't understand the distinction.

Reading the Constitution, or rereading the Founding Fathers' philosophical statements, as they deliberated the Constitution, one of their greatest fears was a national government that would impose its will, its plurality, its thoughts, its religion on the people. They expressly wanted to revolt against that very concept, which prevailed in the old theocratic dynasties of Europe. The irony is that Scalia and Bush want to restore the pre-revolutionary dynasties of "the old Europe" to the U.S.

What the Christian right says today is that the founding fathers were only concerned about religious freedom from government interference. They weren't concerned about government freedom from religious interference. That is the big lie of the religious right today. In fact, the founders were concerned both about religious freedom from government interference and government freedom from religious interference. And no government had ever been free from religious interference, and no minority religion before in America had ever been free from government interference. They naturally cared about both, because all around them – and yes, all over old Europe – they saw what the union between government and religion meant for both religion and government.

It was a radical notion. It was a true revolution at the time, and a form of government that brought strength to the individual, to secularism, to embracing a diversity of religions, to the freedom that Bush proclaims but then goes on to try and undercut here at home.

What did secularism – that dramatic revolutionary introduction of the protection of the individual and individuals' rights, and the right of the individual to determine his or her government – what did that bring to the United States? And what's the argument for a secular society?

The argument for a secular government is it enables everything to flourish within a society. But, ironically, one of the reasons there are so many religions in the United States is that we did have a secular government right from the beginning. In Europe, because there was always a union of church and state, being a religious dissident meant being a political dissident, too. You couldn't not be, because religion and government were united.

Now in America, when people were religious dissidents, they just ran off and founded another church. You could do that in America. And the strength of secular government is that it allows everything to flourish. It has probably led to the feeling that all religion is somehow good, whereas in Europe, they had longer demonstrations, well into the 20th century in some countries like Spain, of the damning power of the union between religion and government. I think we focus on Bush too much, we secularists. Bush couldn't be possible without a kind of flabbiness of mind in America. Somehow, we have enjoyed secular government for so long that we don't have before us a clear vision of the dangers of a society in which government isn't secular.

Well, isn't part of that the old conundrum that it's like herding cats, which is to say when you are secular, even if you are religious ...

Well, lots of religious people believe in secular government.

Yes. So if you are that way, you each have your own thoughts, it's hard to have a united Democratic Party, for instance, because it's composed of independent individuals.

Whereas the Republican right wing is moving forward in a very uniform, kind of hierarchical, strict-father model, divinely inspired, undissenting fashion. It's very hard to counteract because you have different viewpoints about how to counteract it on the secular side. Because having differing viewpoints is at the core of an embracing secularism.

That's like what I was saying, that the people who are intensely focused on one thing, as fundamentalists are, they are far more disciplined. This is true of a lot of social issues that are related to but also independent of religion.

Look, Sen. Hillary Clinton made a speech [recently] in which she said, "We who support abortion rights need to find common ground with the anti-abortion people on things like preventing pregnancies." Well, there's really one problem with that, which is the anti-abortion people – most of them – are just as anti-contraception, so they're not really just anti-abortion. They're also anti- the kinds of things that can reduce the need for abortion by preventing pregnancy.

So, you know, when you talk about common ground, liberals tend to be looking for common ground, but I don't believe the right wing in this country wants common ground. To liberals and people who believe in secular government – I say forget about the fundamentalists. Appeal to the 60 or 70 percent of the American people who aren't fundamentalists – who may have lots of religious beliefs but who also believe in secular government. Don't waste time trying to persuade people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. You're not going to persuade those people of anything.

Let me just ask your perspective on something slightly outside the framework of the book. Do you think that technology was supposed to be liberating? I mean, there was a conventional wisdom that it was going to liberate society. Do you think maybe there's a backlash, in the sense that 20-25 percent of the American population wants this fundamentalist certainty in the face of an overwhelming advancement in technology that's causing dislocation and confusion? Or is faith – is that kind of faith just always there?

That kind of faith is always there. But here's something I feel very, very strongly about. Technology has nothing to do with liberty and freethinking at all. Technology is just a tool. And one of the great successes of the Christian right is they employ technology very effectively. Nobody uses the Internet more effectively than the Christian right.

Science – real scientific and rational thought – is something quite other than technology. The Christian right very often is anti- the kind of rationalism that science is based on. For example, the renewed anti-evolutionist movement – the new movement against the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in the public schools – is because Darwin's theory of evolution, of course, does not support the theology that the whole world was created in seven days. But you can use the Internet to promote anti-evolutionism just as easily as you can use it to promote pro-evolutionism.

So I think technology – really, thinking of technology as anything but an instrument of whatever ideology people happen to have – is a mistake. Technology itself is not a liberating force, even though it actually is a product of rational thought. But anybody can use it.

You close your book, and we'll close the interview with – a quote from King Lear, and then you say: "This is the essence of the secularist and humanist state, and it must be offered not as a defensive response to the religiously correct, but as a robust creed worthy of the world's first secular government. American secularists have trouble deciding what to call themselves today, in part because the term has been denigrated by the right and in part because identifying oneself as a secular humanist ... has a vaguely bureaucratic ring. It is time to revive the evocative and honorable freethinker, with its insistence that Americans think for themselves instead of relying on received opinion. The combination of free and thought embodies every ideal that secularists still hold out to a nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth."

That's a really good sentence. I like it!

Yes, yes – I wonder who wrote it? But you end by emphasizing the deeds we accomplish on earth. The original founders of the nation said people elect the government, and then the government is responsible to the people. Otherwise, they elect a new government. That was a revolutionary thought. And have we reached a point where deeds are divorced from faith?

With Bush, it seems that every day we wake up, and no matter what he does, there's a renewed faith in him as a person. His deeds are separated from his faith, from his promises, from his speeches, and he's not held accountable for his deeds. He's held accountable for what he says is his faith and his optimism. There is a disconnect – we've lost accountability at least for the national government in terms of its deeds, and the deeds become separated from the words and the administration is judged by its words, not its actions.

Well, I would say as a freethinker and as a secularist – I would say the ideal response to that definitely comes from the Bible, and it is, "By their fruits, ye shall know them."

Well, with that I want to thank you, Susan. It's a wonderful book and definitely full of insightful historical background on why we are a secular nation and what strength that brings to the great democracy that we are, and that we hopefully will be once again.

Thank you.

Editor's Note: Author of one of BuzzFlash's all-time best sellers, "Blinded by the Right," the former journalist for the vast right wing conspiracy, the man who came in from the wrong, David Brock has penned another knock-out book whose title says it all, "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy."

Brock's new book is a comprehensive analysis of the right wing media echo chamber -- and it is indispensable to anyone who believes that the GOP has taken a few pages out of the Goebbels handbook and run with it. And if you don't think that is the case you will, if you read "The Republican Noise Machine." It explains how we have ended up with a whole army of "Stepford" right wingers.

And Brock has done more than write about the ministry of Republican media propaganda, he started a research center to expose the deceptions and lies that are disseminated daily by the likes of FOX News and Rush Limbaugh. Just go to MediaMatters.org for a sampling of what Brock's new project is up to.

We last talked with you when your bestseller "Blinded by the Right" came out and you were being blindsided by the right as a result of the book. We came to your defense and got a lot out, and our readers got a lot out of our interviews with you. You've got a new book out, "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy." But before we get into that, you're doing something about the right-wing media echo chamber. Tell us what it is.

Media Matters for America is a progressive research center that monitors, analyzes and corrects conservative misinformation in the media. It's primarily web-driven, and we are posting our analysis and corrections in real time, every day, as the result of our monitoring. For example, we're recording and transcribing Rush Limbaugh, and we're TIVO-ing and analyzing and correcting what's on cable. We're looking at a lot of the right-wing websites with the hope that we can spot this conservative misinformation before it spreads into the mainstream media. And then we're also analyzing print as well.

Do you plan to do any studies?

Yes, absolutely. It is a research center; it's not just a website. We're going to do longer-term analysis of trends and issue reports. We just launched this last week, and so we're in our very, very first iteration of this. But I think there's a lot of room for longer-term analysis of the trends, trying to document the echo chamber by which a piece of conservative misinformation might start on a right-wing website or with talk radio, and then ends up being legitimized and repeated throughout the mainstream media. And so we will be doing that as well.

When BuzzFlash started we took a look at the Drudge Report, and we took it seriously, whereas a lot of progressives and independents dismissed Drudge.

That's right.

We thought Drudge was unfortunately having a tremendous impact on bottom-feeding the mainstream media. And while we hope our standards are a bit above Drudge, nonetheless we took that as a model for the way that our site is constructed with headlines and commentary from a progressive perspective. Have you taken into account what Brent Bozell has done with the conservative Media Research Center?

Yes, I have. In fact, the idea for this organization -- the book I'm publishing next week, The Republican Noise Machine, goes into the history of how the conservative movement has over time and through strategic funding been able to come to a point where they dominate our discourse. And part of that strategy was the formation of several media watchdog or monitoring groups, going back to 1969. Today, the premier one is Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, which has roughly a $6 million annual budget, and, I believe, something like 60 employees who monitor the media. And obviously what they are trying to do is to market and brand the notion of liberal bias.

Perceived liberal bias.

Yes, what they consider to be liberal bias. I don't believe they ever proved that. But the fact is that they are moving the media itself to the right by dominating the debate over the politics of the media, and by convincing -- including, I think, close to a majority of Democrats -- that the media is liberally biased. The monitoring concept is very similar to what they're doing, but we are focusing on misinformation. We're not focusing on bias, because I believe bias is a very slippery and subjective term. You'll always have some people who agree with your opinion about what may have been the motivation of a newscaster or a reporter. We're not going into that, because those are not provable things. What we're trying to do is focus on accuracy, reliability and credibility -- all under the rubric of misinformation. So we're carrying out what we're doing very much differently than what they do, because I think a lot of what they do is just fraudulent. However, the concept of monitoring itself was a very effective device that the right came up with, and it is modeled on that concept.

I think your book "Blinded by the Right" was so instructive for us in particular, because independents, Democrats, liberals, progressives and so forth are dismissive of this sometimes -- of understanding what the right has done, and to grant that while the substance of what they do may be perhaps immoral, unethical, or untruthful, they have had successful strategies. We have to differentiate between content and strategy.

Correct. That is actually, I think, the most important point. I've obviously been in conversations that have been ongoing since I published Blinded by the Right -- about fashioning effective responses, and what kind of institutions could be built. And there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the question. I think you said it perfectly -- distinguishing between content and strategy. There is today The Center for American Progress, a liberal, progressive version of The Heritage Foundation. It does not mean that the research coming out of there is of the low quality of the research coming out of The Heritage Foundation. I worked at Heritage for a year, and people don't have to take my word for it. There have been plenty of analyses -- and, in fact, books written -- that talk about how shoddy the research is, and that it's basically public relations and propaganda.

So the same thing is not going on at the several at the Center for American Progress. They're doing good, factual, solid research. But the idea of creating an institution -- that it's funded in perpetuity to wage what the right wing calls the war of ideas -- is a very good one. And that's a war that I think progressives have not waged in this way, by creating these institutions that are meant to be there. They're not connected to political campaigns. They're meant to be there before an election, and they're meant to be there the day after the election, no matter the outcome of the election.

You ran the risk of opening yourself up to personal attacks due to "Blinded by the Right" from so-called liberal newspapers like the Washington Post, which ran a lacerating review of your book.

Yes. Still today -- this is our ninth day of Media Matters operation -- they have not noted that we exist.

And this used to be, at least, considered a liberal paper. It's held up by the right wing as a liberal paper. And that's a bit of a joke, because we know while The New York Times editorial page continues to be what one might call traditionally liberal, its news page, along with the Washington Post, tends to be extremely hard on Democrats and extremely easy on Bush.

We commissioned a poll for our launch and we asked a question about people's perception of the mainstream media's coverage of the Bush administration. Unfortunately I'm not looking at it right now, but if people go to our website they'll see that a majority, or at least a plurality, have thought that the mainstream press was far too soft on the Bush administration, which is backup for some of what you're saying there.

Your book concentrates almost entirely on an analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber, if we can call it that, and the relationship to think tanks, along with the role of Rush Limbaugh and so forth. Now the Republicans took a country that was kind of centrist-to-left on social welfare issues, New Deal issues, Social Security, Medicare, and so forth, and moved the debate way to the right, although a lot of the polling still supports this sort of center, moderate, liberal, New Deal concept of America. Hasn't the Republican media machine shown that you can do this successfully?

Let me describe what happened on the right-wing side. Yes, I think it is correct in the sense that they took ideas that if you go back to the Goldwater era and then forward into the early 1970s when they really started funding these think tanks, they took ideas that were considered fringe and extreme. The conservatives were a minority within their own party. And through this strategy that I lay out in the book -- a specific strategy that was specifically funded -- they took what were considered some of the planks for Goldwater: the hostility to civil rights, hostility to the United Nations, the privatizing of Social Security -- things like that. That is still, to a large extent, the Republican agenda today.

What they were able to do is to mainstream these ideas first within the Republican Party, and then through the whole political culture. The only thing I think is significant is that they did not rely on elected politicians to do this for them, so that when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation had been working for six or seven years on what would become the policy blueprint for the Reagan administration, and they handed it to them.

But the people who led this conservative movement in the early 1970s were ideological people who were passionate, who had the financial resources to do this. And they were unelected people, such as the person who's still the head of the Heritage Foundation today, Ed Fulmer. So that was where the leadership came from. I would argue that it was not actually Ronald Reagan or either Bush who really moved the ball. The ball was moved through effective communication and strategic philanthropy that was organized by the right, and not primarily through their elected politicians. The only one who really understood this, I think, was Newt Gingrich. But the others are the beneficiary of all this work that was done by non-elected leaders.

Newt Gingrich -- if we kind of look at his doppelganger or his alter ego in the media, from my perspective it would be Rush Limbaugh. Rush kind of idealizes the Gingrich approach, which a cultural media populism appealing to emotional flashpoints -- call it demagoguery -- to get people emotionally on the side of the right wing, and then repeating falsehoods that become engrained in their heads. As you point out in your book, they become circulated among other Republican officials. Limbaugh legitimizes certain ways of thinking and certain thoughts.

Right, and it's a kind of inverted populism where, by playing to primarily cultural prejudices, he was able to take the Republican-conservative right-wing economic agenda -- which I don't think there was a lot of popular support for, and there still may not be -- but by emphasizing those cultural issues, he was able to bring a lot of people along who I think otherwise would be voting more their economic interests; i.e., voting with progressives and liberals. Through all of the bashing he does of feminism and gays and that kind of thing, he's able to get them to side against their own economic interests by highlighting the cultural divisions.

It's not coincidence that Cheney appears fairly regularly on his show. And that after Limbaugh was first charged with illegal use of prescription drugs, Bush was asked about him, and he said, �He is a great American.� He seems a vital link because without him the right wing could lose some of the blue-collar voters, because he emotionally targets them on the so-called gays, gods and guns issue -- wedge issues.

I think the phenomena of Limbaugh is understood in the conservative movement, but not well understood outside of it. Someone asked me this today -- when did the right wing start to really get mainstream media attraction for its talking points, and its propaganda, and its lies and disinformation? I wrote about this in Blinded by the Right, but the period that I was in the conservative movement, from 1986 to, say, 1997, there was a critical shift, and I think Limbaugh is really the key to it.

Part of that had to do with sales. For example, once Limbaugh went into national syndication in 1988, and then he started to get huge audiences into the early 90s, he could take information from places like the Washington Times or from National Review, or he could take a book, as he did with my book, The Real Anita Hill, and he could sell that book. Then it would make the best seller list, and there would be a perception in the regular media that, well, if a book is selling, then there must be something to it, or it must have some kind of credibility.

Then you could go on the Today Show with your misinformation, as I did. And then you'd reach another 6 million people who are not the Limbaugh audience. He's really a critical piece of this entire thing. In 1986, I was at the sister publication of the Washington Times, Insight magazine. Back then, the Washington Times was seen as a fringe and unreliable, and it had a circulation of about roughly 100,000. The critical shift that I try to describe in The Republican Noise Machine is that 18 years later, because of Limbaugh, and then because of all the Limbaugh imitators on radio, because of cable and particularly Fox, and because of the Internet -- all those things happening subsequent to '86 -- a wrong or false article in the Washington Times that was done in '86 only reached the circulation of the Washington Times.

Today, that author of that wrong or false piece -- Limbaugh can read it to 15 million. The author could go on Bill O'Reilly's show and reach whatever it is -- 2-3 million? And Drudge could post the Washington Times story and have another several million. This is a structural change in the media environment. And I think that that is the critical reason why progressives -- although they still win elections -- seem to steadily be losing the hearts and minds.

This is an issue that interests us very much. In 2000, the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media was Gore was becoming too populist, whereas we would argue that he probably should have been more populist and gotten so far ahead that Bush couldn't steal the election. As we know, he still won the popular vote by 542,000 votes, so I don't know how that's being too populist. But in any case, it seems the Democrats are always on the defensive in the DLC, saying, oh, we can't afford to be too populist, whereas the Republicans are brazenly populist in the sense of appealing to a value populism.

But the Democrats are definitely afraid to bring up economic populism. The Republicans say, oh, you're trying to create class warfare, while the Republican Party basically rules in Congress and got within enough distance to steal the presidency because of a cultural populism. So it seems to work for the Republicans, and the Democrats haven't figured out yet that that's what they're doing.

Well, it's certainly the case that this is where the absence of liberal radio, I believe, is an enormous problem for liberals and progressives because the populism of the Republican right is largely coming out of radio. And radio is a populist medium. Without that kind of voice -- I believe one study showed 310 hours a day of right-wing talk, and five hours of liberal talk, in something like the top 45 U.S. radio markets -- when you have that kind of disproportionate influence, when you have one ideological faction controlling that medium to that level, I think you have -- and this is in the subtitle of my book -- serious questions about the proper functioning of the democracy, which is predicated on the idea that people need correct, and good, and solid information.

Their dominance of that media has led to a lack of an even playing field to such an extent that I question whether any issue could be fairly debated, and whether you can actually have a fair election. Because if you go back to what they did to Gore, and the false caricature of Gore as a liar -- that was repeated and repeated through radio day after day. Eventually it did shape the coverage in the mainstream media. If you look at the exit polls, the majority of voters went with Gore on the issues and on the platform, including on taxes, but the election was won by Bush on this issue of integrity and who you trusted. There was a completely fraudulent propaganda initiative to go after Gore's character because they knew, in their own internal polling, they couldn't win any other way.

I reprint in the book an interview that Al Gore gave to the New York Observer in November 2002 where he lays this out absolutely correctly -- that this was what happened -- that the Republicans were able to change the entire zeitgeist of the country through these right-wing media organs.

I've been saying for months that no matter who the Democrats nominated this year, that person would face the same problem because the machinery is in place. The particulars of the story having to do with the particular backgrounds of the candidates would mean that the script would be slightly different. But the machinery is in place, and the ability to create those caricatures is in place. What I've tried to talk about is I think a lot of people, even progressives, misunderstood what happened in the �90s, to the extent that they felt that what had happened had something to do with the Clintons. And I believe it had very little to do with the Clintons; the same smearing that happened to the Clintons happened to Gore, and then it also happened to Daschle. If you looked at Al Franken's book and the way he lays out what happened during the Wellstone memorial, and how that whole thing was completely distorted and misrepresented right before another election, this is a really critical issue.

If you go back to the famous Joe McGinnis book "The Selling of the President" about Nixon in 1968, it discusses that Nixon was posed as a commodity to be sold. We saw that leap exponentially when Reagan was nominated. Here you had an actor who was really a blank slate in many ways, even though he espoused a right-wing ideology. The Reagan presidency was sold on Morning in America commercials. It was the complete triumph of image over substance of leadership. And with Bush, although he's become a better sort of scripted speaker -- obviously not extemporaneous, but better scripted -- he carries that one step further, because he's an even lighter candidate than Reagan in terms of image. Isn't this really the advertising model of branding an image, and no matter what appears contrary to that image, you just keep going on with the brand?

One of the points I try to make in "The Republican Noise Machine" is the superior understanding that the conservatives have had for three decades. but it accelerated so much because of the development of new media -- the Internet and cable and radio. They have an understanding of branding, marketing and PR. It's well more than a billion dollars that has been spent in just the subsidized parts of the right wing -- the partisan think tanks and many of the pundits you see on cable, and the Washington Times and New York Post and things of this nature.

Within the think tanks, they create jargon: faith-based initiatives and school vouchers. They create a language for talking about their ideas, and they package the ideas, and then they sell them. And they come up with the phrases as you would if you were selling any product. These are all products. Liberal bias is a product too. They funded it, they branded it, and they kept repeating it and repeating it. And they convinced people of it.

We're seeing that as Bush continues to talk about democracy in Iraq when it seems, at this point, the Iraqis don't want us and the only democracy would be one that we impose and run. But he still keeps saying nothing will deter us from this mission. The flowery appeal to democracy and patriotism continues to flow out of Bush despite reality. We've got a script and we're sticking to it, no matter what happens.

Right. And they have an operation, which I go into in a lot of detail in the book, to disseminate and to keep people on those messages. From all of these investments and think tanks, you have talking points and research flowing into the distribution channels, which are the media channels such as radio, so that all those hours on the air are not being filled by the hosts or by the staff of the hosts themselves. They are getting their content out of what began to be created in the early 1970s, and what is today a vast interlocking network of partisan think tanks and research centers. They're provided all that.

And that extends as well to cable, where the conservative hosts and conservative guests are supplied in real time with what the message of the day is, and what the party line is. It's still coming out of this multi-billion dollar communications apparatus that the right set up.

How does that work in terms of the corporately owned CBS, NBC, ABC, and affiliates? What role do they have to play in their news operations?

What seems to have happened is that the right wing wanted to mainstream its ideas and wanted to infiltrate and penetrate the mainstream media. I think they've had the easiest time with cable partly because there's so much airtime to fill and partly because, if you look at the demographics, the people watching cable -- not just Fox, but the other cable -- it skews conservative. It's something like 40 percent of above. And the numbers for liberals watching cable are quite low -- it's less than 20 percent. Part of this is what you're saying, which is that it's ratings-driven and advertiser-driven. As far as the big network morning shows and the evening news, I think the right has an effect, but I think it has had less of an effect, in putting out bad information in those places.

Then again, through creating pundits like Ann Coulter and having a conservative book club in place, where you can drive a book like that onto the best seller list, she still does end up on Today or Good Morning America with books that are just page after page of lies. So they are everywhere, and it's spreading. One of the parts of this organization is to combat and to push back against it, because these ideas are not reliable or credible, and that has to be documented. We have to move the mainstreaming in reverse.

What role does technology play? A barrage of information is distributed in headline fashion. Even print media, with the emergence of USA Today, has its own McNews, and you're starting to see even the larger papers run shorter articles and fewer investigative articles.

It seems that the Bush administration in particular relies on the media sort of being ahistorical -- that is, each day it sort of begins freshly to cover the news, and you rarely see context of what Rumsfeld said a week ago. You might see that in some of the magazines, or occasionally in a longer article, but news is basically whatever the White House dictates that day.

Well, that is true, and it is the case that because information travels so fast, the context is often lost. Where they have had their greatest impact, I think, is with the media that lends itself to illogic, which is radio and a lot of the crossfire formats on cable. The insidious effect in the mainstream media, which I go back and show started in the early 1970s, was the conservative promotion of the idea of balance. So the groups that they funded to pressure the media were agitating for equal time and balance. And once the mainstream media accepted that as the correct way of reporting, what you ended up with was, under the rubric of balance, they had to report things that were false and wrong that conservatives were saying, because they had to give the other side. And the media stops its quest for truth and accepted that all they had to do was balance. So there are many assertions in the regular press, and one of the reports we have up on our website talks about the way the conservatives were able to convince a majority of Americans that the economic recession began under Clinton, when in fact it began in March of 2001. And what you see in that report is that over time mainstream media quote Republican officials saying falsely that the economic recession began under Clinton. And then there's a missing paragraph; the next paragraph should be: But it didn't.

Someone who reads "The Republican Noise Machine," what will they get out of it?

I think what they'll get out of it is an understanding of how the conservative system works, from heavy documentation going back to the early 1970s that there were specific plans put in place. The plans are in writing and I identify what those plans were, and how they were funded, and what exactly the strategies were over time to achieve what they've achieved.

The book does deal with the present media landscape, but a lot of it is tracing how, through a lot of patience and a lot of money -- it's all about following the money -- the Republican right was able to achieve the goal of infiltration and penetration of the media. They understood from the beginning that all politics is translated through the media, so that has been their focus. And the irony is that at the same time they mounted a simultaneous strategy to bash the media as liberally biased. The two worked hand in hand to change the entire complexion of the media.