Robert Mercer: Powerful, Rich, Gullible & Dangerously Deluded
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Is he a racist? Probably. Is he a card-carrying Libertarian aligned with the Koch Brothers? Definitely. Is he a powerful, rich, gullible and critically, dangerously deluded Idiot-Savant? Sadly, yes. He is a subscriber to elaborate, paranoid, quasi-scientific conspiracy theories. He’s always been really secretive, and seems to be critically socially stunted. He can’t meet others’ eyes, even in close relationships or direct personal communication, and he shuns the spotlight. But his boys, Bannon and Trump, and their bullshit — their absurdly offensive antics, their ridiculous brinksmanship and juvenile utterances — are outing him in a big, bad, nasty way. Which is a good thing.
On Wednesday, August 17th, 2017, one day prior to his departure from the White House, former chief strategist Steve Bannon met with Robert Mercer, the billionaire mega-donor who backs President Donald Trump, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and countless Far Right schemes. The meeting was held out at Mercer’s Long Island estate, the Owl’s Nest, to discuss what comes next in terms of political and media strategy. Mercer, who is co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, then met with Trump and a small group of donors the next night at Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster. A source with knowledge of the meetings reported that both Mercer and Bannon “remain strong supporters of President Trump’s and his agenda.” (Jennifer Martinez, ‘Bannon already met this week with a GOP mega-donor to plot his next steps,’ Business Insider, Aug. 18, 2017.)
Robert Mercer is one of the most enigmatic and powerful forces in U.S. politics. Working with his daughter Rebekah, he’s spent tens of millions to advance a conservative agenda, investing in think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Breitbart ‘news,’ and Cambridge Analytica psychographic behavioural modification corporation, a data company that builds psychological profiles of voters. Mercer does not stop at the U.S. border in purveying his influence. A secret legal document shows that the two Brexit campaigns may have illegally coordinated under the direction of Mercer, utilizing Cambridge Analytica and a Canada-based company, of which he owns the IP and therefore directs, Aggregate IQ. The confidential document shows the data firm Cambridge Analytica was hired by Leave.EU during the British election campaign, and purchased the intellectual property license of AggregateIQ, which was retained by Vote Leave. The intellectual property license proves the two campaigns — which publicly feuded during the election — were financially tied together.
Carole Cadwalladr has been probing the links between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaigns through Cambridge Analytica — which she said leads directly to Mercer and his close associate, Steve Bannon. British law prohibits election campaigns from coordinating unless those expenditures are jointly declared, which is intended to prevent the “buying” of elections — but that seems to have happened during the Brexit campaign. “To have a billionaire so directly buying influence in a British election is absolutely unheard of,” said Gavin Millar, an election law expert. “This is completely out of the ordinary, and what’s clear is that our electoral laws are hopelessly inadequate. The only way we would be able to find the truth of what happened is through a public inquiry.” (Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire? We reveal how a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain’s EU referendum,’ The London Guardian, 14 May 2017.)
Groups that Mercer funds have attacked the science of global warming, published a book critical of Hillary Clinton, and bankrolled a documentary lauding Ayn Rand and her racist/elitist economic theories, or ‘Objectivism.’ He’s supported a campaign for the death penalty in Nebraska, and funded ads in New York critical of plans for the ‘ground-zero mosque,’ a memorial to the hundreds of Muslims, working the World Trade Centre, who were killed that day. He and Rebekah have also directed money to an anti-abortion group and a Christian college. The father-daughter Alt-Right alliance don’t discuss their religious leanings, except to say they support a return to what they term ‘Judeo-Christian Values,’ which they deem as being the guiding ethos of the West. But it is fairly evident from the causes they support that their shared theological beliefs range in the more Fundamentalist, least reason-oriented spectrum of the moral-supremacist Religious Right.
Rebekah Mercer is notorious for screaming and ‘yelling’ in her speeches and addresses to Heritage Foundation, Atlas Network, the Acton Group (Evangelical Mega-Church arm of the Atlas Institute designed to make subject populations confuse their economic domination and exploitation with religious obedience, unreasoning devotion, and being ‘saved’), and the many other elite Far-Right organizations she and her father fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. She performs, in closed, elite forums, in a manner that can only be described as ‘manic’ or ‘shrill’ — that hackneyed old saw used for generations by misogynistic antifeminist male pundits to describe and dismiss the discourse of angry, passionate women, usually feminists. Only, in this case — in describing the ranting, prating, pontificating, bullying and grandstanding of racist, antifeminist, Islamophobic, classist, elitist, plutocratic Rebekah Mercer — the wielding of the term is apt. Sadly, her inestimable resources mean that she will not be dismissed; in fact, she is universally acknowledged as the most powerful woman in American politics today.
A huge amount of Mercer’s loyalty and funding goes to the weird fringe of Right Wing causes. For years he’s attended (and heavily funded) an annual conference organized by Jane Orient, an Arizona physician and activist who recently hatched a wild conspiracy theory that suggests rogue elements in the U.S. government were behind the San Bernadino massacre. Mercer money also found its way to a Right Wing Idaho activist, Fred Kelly Grant, who travels the country agitating against environmental protection laws, which he maintains are another sinister plot promulgated by the United Nations, meant to depopulate rural America.
Those who’ve actually managed to have a discussion with him say Mercer is preoccupied with the country’s monetary and banking systems. He sees these as having been hopelessly compromised by government meddling. He was the primary financial backer of the Jackson Hole Summit, a conference that took place in Wyoming last August to advocate for the gold standard, though his name wasn’t displayed anywhere on the agenda. Secretive and cripplingly shy in social situations, he sat with Rebekah toward the back of the audience, “…an unobtrusive, silver-haired gentleman with dark brows, wire-rimmed glasses, a navy suit, and a red tie. At dinner that night, he sat at a table while other guests chattered around him, softly whistling to himself.” (Zachary Mider, ‘What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz: Robert Mercer is one of the wealthiest, most secretive, influential, and reactionary Republicans in the country,’ Bloomberg Politics, January 20, 2016.)
His father was a research scientist who held posts all over the country, mostly out West. When he was ten, his father told him about a wondrous military machine, called a computer. This disclosure sparked a lifelong obsession. In high school in the 1960s, in New Mexico, Mercer was already filling a notebook with sophisticated code, despite having no computer with which to test it.
Mercer documented what he called his “computational life” in 2014, in his speech accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics in Baltimore. He found his life’s calling during a college job at an Air Force weapons lab in New Mexico: “I loved everything about computers. I loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night. I loved the air-conditioned smell of the place. I loved the sound of the discs whirring and the printers clacking.” His time at the lab also gave him lifelong distaste for government bureaucracy. After figuring out how to increase his computer’s speed by 100 times, “…a strange thing happened. Instead of running the old computations in 1/100 of the time, the powers that be at the lab ran computations that were 100 times bigger. I took this as an indication that one of the most important goals of government-financed research is not so much to get answers as it is to consume the computer budget. Which has left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research.”
Mercer joined IBM after earning a Ph.D. in Computing Science, becoming part of a team endeavouring to teach computers how to translate human language. “Linguists tackling the problem at the time were convinced they needed to teach computers the intricacies of each language’s grammar and syntax to make any progress. Mercer was part of a group of programmers who knew little about linguistics. Instead, they just dumped huge blocks of translated text into a computer and then taught it to guess at the likely relationships between words, using statistics.” Linguists abhorred the programmers’ work when they presented it at a conference in 1988, but Mercers’ team’s methodology worked. Their purely mathematical algorithmic approach formed the basis of current speech-recognition software and tools, including Google Translate.
In 1993, the hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, noticed Mercer’s work. They headhunted him and some of his IBM team. Located on Long Island’s North Shore, an hour or so from New York City, the hedge fund and think tank was the brainchild of James Simons, the former military codebreaker and math professor who gave his name to an important Computer Science theory. “Renaissance operates more like a university math department than a Wall Street trading shop.” Scores of math and physics Ph.D.s work on a fifty-acre campus, “complete with a library, a gym, and tennis courts, using computers to crunch market data and spot patterns a human trader would overlook.” (Zachary Mider, January 20, 2016.)
Mercer is currently being sued for wrongful dismissal by a former employee, who claims Mercer is a racist: ‘Magerman felt obliged to inform the press about his boss’s viewpoints — and that he received verbal assurance by Renaissance C.O.O. Mark Silber that the statements he intended to make were “permissible under company policy.” Those racist opinions, according to Magerman, included comments such as:
a) The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civl Rights Act in the 1960s;
b) African Americans were doing fine in the late-1950s and early-1960s before the Civil Rights Act;
c) The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americas by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work;
d) The only racist people remaining in the United States are black; and
e) White people have no racial animus toward African Americans anymore, and if there is any, is it not something that the government should be concerned with.
‘The best part of the filing, at least to us, was that when Magerman “point[ed] out that society was segregated before the Civil Rights Act and African Americans were required to use separate and inferior schools, water fountains, and other everyday services and items,” Mercer allegedly responded that “those issues were not important.” In a subsequent phone conversation (the “white supremacist” one), Magerman claimed Mercer initially “disputed that he had said such things, although he did not actually deny saying them” and “in the course of rehashing the conversation . . . repeated many of these same views, and even cited research that allegedly supported his opinion that the Civil Rights Act harmed African Americans economically.” (A spokesman for Renaissance declined to comment.)
‘Apropos of nothing, Mercer was a major supporter of Jeff Session’s nomination for attorney general. Sessions, you may recall, was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 over allegations of racism. Equally disturbing is Mercer’s take on nuclear meltdowns, which according to a former employee, he suggested are not such a big deal.’ While the Koch brothers are libertarian ideologues and fellow right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson is singularly focused on the state of Israel and his gambling empire, the Mercers are something else entirely. They are fringe kooks with a vast fortune and a willingness to back other fringe kooks, including Steve Bannon. Rebekah Mercer was a director of his Government Accountability Institute propaganda outfit, and the family has heavily funded Breitbart News. (Bess Levin, ‘ROBERT MERCER, TRUMP’S SUGAR DADDY, IS BEING SUED: David Magerman is accusing Mercer of wrongful termination after he publicly accused his right-wing boss of racism, Vanity Fair, May 8, 2017.)
Both Mercers have spent scores of millions of dollars on various right-wing candidates and institutions in recent years, including establishment organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. In the Republican primaries they backed Sen. Ted Cruz with the Keep the Promise super PAC and later the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC. Both of those groups employed Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie, who later joined the Trump campaign alongside Steve Bannon, assigned their new roles by Rebekah Mercer. The Mercers fund the Ayn Randian ‘Objectivist’ think tank, The Atlas Network. ‘Atlas Network’ is a ‘think tank’ organized during Regan’s Republican reign, and masquerading as ‘Reaganomics.’
Kellyanne Conway Tweeted out the image above in December, 2016, with the caption: “Honoring the ultimate hero at the Mercer “Heroes and Villians” party on Long Island. Crowd thrilled w/ surprise!” The ‘Heroes and Villains’ party was hosted by the Mercers at their annual bash at their Long Island estate, ‘The Owl’s Nest,’ the entrance to which is shown below:
The Atlas Network has heavily infiltrated a shadowy ‘Judeo-Christian’ secret society, called ‘The Family,’ that is centred in Washington D.C. but which maintains chapters throughout the world, including within the Vatican City. Also known as The Fellowship, the Family is a secretive Fundamentalist Christian association led by Douglas Coe. Like Bannon, The Family elevates nihilistic fascist leaders they liken to Jesus. The organization fetishizes power by comparing Jesus to Lenin, Ho Chi Min, Bin Laden and others as examples of strong leaders who demand absolute loyalty and who change the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers.” (Bannon presented his ‘Judeo-Christian values’ laissez faire survivalist views to the Third International Conference on Human Dignity, in the Should Christians impose limits on wealth creation? panel, held in the Vatican, in July, 2014. His speech was praised in Catholic publications worldwide.)
The brownstone at 133 C Street S.E. is a red-brick structure registered as a church and affiliated with the secretive Christian group known by many names, one of them being the Fellowship Foundation. Tucked on the edge of the Capitol complex, the house has functioned as a shield for the lawmakers who live and pray there. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford blew away the privacy of the place, revealing that he had confided in his C Street “Christian friends” the cross-continental affair that he had hidden from his wife.
The Mega-Churches organized through the De Vos Evangelical billionaire family’s ‘Acton Institute,’ comprise the religious, theological arm of the ideological ‘Atlas Network.’ Active around the world, they function as a sort of Judeo-Christian values-touting missionary task force, promulgating corporate infiltration in countries like Venezuela at the moment. Touting an Ayn Randian racial-elite ‘win with Jesus’ theology, they are very active in Central and South America with regard to promoting incendiary corporate-friendly regime change, which is where Trump’s otherwise incoherent recent statements re: imminent military operations in Venezuela came from. This faction is bucking to send in the De Vos scion and corporate mercenary militia warlord, Eric Prince, of Blackwater notoriety. But their influence is especially noticeable in the Alt-Right Movement of the current White House and administration. The Acton Institute confederation of Mega Church pastors are who had their hands all over the president in the Oval Office that time.
Robert Mercer is essentially a machine-gun-collecting computer genius who made his billions relatively late in life. He became CEO of Renaissance Technologies in 2009, along with another of the scientists who’d come over to the hedge fund with him from IBM. Though a genius with computers and financial data, when it comes to politics Mercer more closely resembles a tinfoil-hat conspiracy nut. It’s hard to find a survivalist-oriented fringe scientific theory he hasn’t funded, ‘from climate change denial to conferences that feature speakers presenting “evidence” that HIV does not cause AIDS and the disease is an elaborate government cover-up of the health risks of “the homosexual lifestyle.” He’s also put a lot of money into groups promoting far-right economic theories, including the weird idea that “fractional reserve banking,” which is something banks have always done — lending their depositors’ money to others — is a massive fraud.’ (Bess Levin, May 8, 2017.)
It would appear that Mercer believes everything he reads or hears from right-wing kooks so long as it assuages one or more of the fears and phobias he apparently has in great numbers. It has even been speculated that con men and grifters can see him coming from a mile away. The Mercers appear to be financing the thriving Far-Right fringe organizations and wacky Evangelical theories in America, with causes including White Nationalism, Climate Denial and quack medicine. (Heather Digby Parton, ‘Steve Bannon’s web of weirdness: Meet the bizarre billionaires behind the president-elect’s chief strategist: Behind the new White House strategist stand Robert and Rebekah Mercer, eccentric billionaires with weird obsessions,’ Salon, Nov. 15, 2016.)
Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has of course found absolutely no evidence to support this idea. According to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, “was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren’t such a big deal.” Mercer isn’t pulling his unorthodox opinions on the effects of extreme radiation out of thin air. Arthur Robinson, his go-to guy for climate change denialism and human urine experimentation, was apparently the one who disabused Mercer of the notion that nukes are bad for humans. Though holding a degree in chemistry from Caltech, Robinson’s work is obviously not respected in bona fide scientific circles. The Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, has called Robinson an “extremist kook.” Despite this opprobrium, Robinson appears to be the source of Robert Mercer’s benign view of nuclear radiation: in 1986, Robinson co-authored a book suggesting that the vast majority of Americans would survive “an all-out atomic attack on the United States.” (Heather Digby Parton, Nov. 15, 2016.)
In 2010, Robinson […]decided to run for Congress in southern Oregon. Robinson, now 73, was not your average candidate. When Robinson ran for office, the Democratic incumbent, Peter DeFazio, had held office for more than 20 years, had way more money, and easily outspent him. But out of the blue, six weeks before the election, an inundation of paid dirty ads hit the airwaves, portraying DeFazio as a Democratic puppet. When the ads first appeared, Robinson says he had no idea who’d paid for them. Eventually the Washington operatives who bought them revealed they were working for Robert Mercer. (Robinson says he’s never actually discussed politics with Mercer.) Robinson still lost to DeFazio, but the $600,000 in ads helped him turn in the best showing for a Republican in that district in decades.
Then, in 2005, Robinson devoted an issue of his newsletter, Access to Energy to appealing for major funding. His objective was to buy an expensive piece of research equipment, called the ‘mass spectrometer.’ He implied that a revolution in medical treatment was at hand, if only he could get his hands on two million dollars to buy the equipment to prove his theory. Very shortly after that, Rebekah Mercer called him up and introduced herself. Soon thereafter the Mercer Family Foundation sent Robinson his first check, for $60,000. “The Mercers have since sent Robinson’s lab, which he calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, at least $1.4 million more, according to the foundation’s tax filings, allowing him to buy freezers to store his growing stockpile of urine.” (Zachary Mider, January 20, 2016.)
The Mercer father-daughter team has single-handedly funded Robinson’s enormous stockpile of frozen human urine in Eastern Oregon. “Starting in 2005, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed at least $1.4 million to OISM, enabling Robinson to buy freezers to store his 14,000 samples of urine. In a lab on a sheep ranch in the Siskiyou Mountains, he’s spent the last couple of years collecting thousands of vials of human urine. Funded by private donors, he claims his work holds the key to extending the human life span and wresting control of medicine from what he calls the “medical-industrial-government complex.” According to his monthly newsletter, Robinson believes nuclear radiation fall-out can actually be good for you, make you healthier, and prolong life. He also believes Climate Science is a hoax. “In his spare time, he buys unwanted pipe organs from churches and reassembles them on his property.” (Heather Digby Parton, Nov. 15, 2016.)
Robinson has white hair and pale eyes, and daily tends his lab dressed in the flannel shirts, bluejeans, and stockinged feet of a backwoods survivalist tending his compound. “The spectrometer, the size of a couple of refrigerators, is whirring and clacking inside, next to a huge antique pipe organ. Outside are two camouflage-painted shipping containers holding some of his 14,000 urine samples in military-grade freezers. The lab stands partway up a hillside overlooking a little valley. Sheep graze in the meadow. Robinson believes his methods will revolutionize diagnostic medicine. “He’ll use the spectrometer to decode the chemical patterns in urine, the red flags that warn of disease before it strikes. The human life span will stretch. It’s hard to judge the credibility of his claims; although he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in the 1960s, he hasn’t published peer-reviewed research on diagnostic medicine in decades.” (Zachary Mider, January 20, 2016.)
In his monthly newsletter, Robinson advocates for a revival of nuclear power, warns that Climate Science is a “false religion” that will enslave mankind, and rails against public education — he home-schooled his six children on the ranch and now sells the curriculum. The common theme in his various projects is a deep distrust of government and a sense that broad segments of the American public are deluded. Mainstream science research, he says, is corrupted by its dependence on the whims of bureaucrats. Even the private health-care industry is part of the “medical monopoly” that stands in the way of progress.
How much of this do the Mercers endorse? Robert Mercer lobbies for nuclear power, thinks that nuclear fallout is not only OK but actually good for you, and hates bureaucrats. He also believes that the theory of global warming is a myth. Both the Mercer father and daughter eschew Climate Science and label it a ‘hoax.’ Like his mentor Robinson, Mercer shares the conviction that public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism,” with “racism” defined as animus emanating solely from African Americans against Whites. Rebekah Mercer home-schools her four children — for all we know, using Robinson’s curriculum. But Robinson maintains he can’t be sure what Mercer subscribes to, exactly, in that his benefactor doesn’t really speak with him, as we understand the term.
“I have strong impressions about him, but they’re based on not too much data. I’m very grateful he’s helped us.” A typical interaction with Mercer, Robinson says, came a few months back, after he wrote in Access to Energy about the closure of a nuclear power plant in California. Robinson calculated that the power from the shuttered reactors could have desalinated enough seawater for all the state’s nonfarm water needs. An e-mail from Mercer showed up in Robinson’s inbox. “He says, you know, ‘I was thinking about that for New Mexico once, but I noticed that lifting the water to where it was needed from the ocean took a lot more energy than desalinating it. You left that out.’ ” Why had Mercer been studying desalination in New Mexico? “I have no idea,” Robinson says. (Zachary Mider, January 20, 2016.)
Robinson continues to issue frequent appeals to the public to contribute urine for his experiment. According to his newsletter, Robinson is collecting the massive quantities of urine in order to “calibrate analytical procedures that can revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry — and thereby improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school.” How exactly this will work is unknown. Robinson told Bloomberg earlier this year that “We’ve completed experiments here, which we could easily publish, but we want to wait until they are perfect.” (Zachary Mider, January 20, 2016.)
According to his colleagues, Mercer has a theory of the quantitive value of humans, which is that they actually have no inherent value — that a human being is only worth as much as they can earn. He is fixed on this Ayn Randian notion, even though it fails to account for children, the elderly, or disabled. This seems odd in that he has had children and, presumably, parents. He argues that he earns thousands of times more than a school teacher, which makes him thousands of times more valuable than school teachers. People on welfare, he suggests, have no value. In fact, they have negative value. He argues that cats have inherent value, however, because watching them provides pleasure to people. (Jon Wiener, ‘One of Trump’s Biggest Donors Thinks Cats Have More Value Than Welfare Recipients: An interview with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer on her research into the darkest reaches of right-wing political funding,’ The Nation, March 24, 2017.)
This suggests that watching people provides him with no pleasure whatsoever, and that it doesn’t even occur to him that people-watching may be pleasurable to others, who would therefore ascribe value to humans, even within his own narrow Objectivist view. That this should, in fact, occur to him but doesn’t underscores his absolute lack of critical or objective thinking ability in areas other than numbers, such as the arts, humanities, social concerns, philosophy, or the so-called Higher Feelings. If it is not a matter of statistics, calculous, binary coding, mathematics, and/or bottom lines, he doesn’t even perceive it as real or valid. Cognitive dissonance is the very least of his moral dilemmas.
This might make you suspect that Robert Mercer is a troubled crank. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, this he is. You may regard him as a socially challenged idiot-savant. He is this, certainly, though not easily dismissed in his critically limited perspectives; his billions guarantee that his views and preferences are eagerly sought and effectively dispensed. The degree to which the Mercers’ sometimes wacky and often injurious ideas have had a hearing in the Oval Office can be gauged from such freakish realities as the presence of Betsy De Vos, who like them despises public schools, running public education, or the Koch Brothers having stocked the EPA with like-minded climate denying appointees.
Mercer has taken Ayn Rand’s essentially sociopathic Objectivist philosophy right out beyond the fringe of the morally bankrupt into the realm of the farcically absurd, with himself as the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ type-cast ‘heroic being.’ His own happiness is the sole, exclusive and therefore fundamentally amoral, malignantly narcissistic purpose of his life, with monetary products and achievements as his obsessional, driving aim. The flawed, stunted thinking he mistakes for ‘reason’ is his only absolute. Making free with our world, he is like a mentally disturbed, emotionally arrested techno-Caligula. To Mercer, our civilization is no more significant, and certainly of less value in terms of the ‘happiness’ it can afford him, than his enormous firearms collection (the biggest in the world, including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s futuristic machine gun in The Terminator), or the multi-million dollar train set and adult play-station he has installed in his basement.
