Every
time I run into Jeff Nesbit, he makes another implausible claim about some
accomplishment in his life: He helped FDA Commissioner David Kessler roll Big
Tobacco on regulations.
He was a Washington correspondent and a writer of 19
inspirational novels. He’s in the record books for a 24-foot long jump for
Duke’s track team. He helped the National Science Foundation fend off a very
un-sciencey George W. Bush Administration and Congress. And he was Vice
President Dan Quayle’s chief spokesman.
Each
time I resist the temptation to stage an impromptu intervention to get this
poor man out of Walter Mittyville. The problem is he’s actually done all of
these things.
Now, along comes one more:
Poison
Tea is
his new investigative book, and let’s just say it’s less inspirational and more
infuriating than his other books. Nesbit, who now runs the influential climate
communications group Climate Nexus, was in a position to write this book
because he was once a communications consultant for a wildly successful Koch Brothers
front group.
Really.
In Poison Tea, he
gives a rare firsthand account of sitting at the table as Big Tobacco joined
hands with energy companies and big-time political operatives to create a
one-size-fits-all template for opposing all manner of taxes and regulation,
from tobacco to energy to pesticides.
Arguably, it’s not too far a leap to say
that the framing of tobacco addiction as a “smokers’ rights” issue a quarter
century ago is the inspiration for framing today’s anti-LGBT frenzy as a
religious freedom issue.
Through
his experience, research, and the trove of documents uncovered in litigation
against tobacco companies, Nesbit traces how the Tea Party grew from decades of
careful cultivation by big money and front groups.
Just as Merchants of
Doubt, the epic 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, traces a long
pattern of manipulation of science on health and environmental issues, Nesbit
follows the political bloodlines of the Tea Party and finds corporate DNA.
American
political journalists are wedded to the Tea Party’s chosen narrative that it
sprang, genuine and fully formed, from the live TV rant of CNBC commentator
Rick Santelli in 2009.
Nesbit unearths a multitude of pipe dreams, blueprints,
and other schemes to launch an anti-regulatory “Tea Party” at least 15 years
before Santelli became the movement’s Abner Doubleday – the war hero whose
mythical tale of inventing the game of baseball lives on more than a century
after it was debunked.
To emphasize the point, CSE established its “U.S. Tea
Party” website in 2002.
Poison
Tea does
a thorough job of not only tracing the impacts and hidden movement architecture
of groups like CSE and its descendants, but also how Big Tobacco found that its
best interests were served by becoming an ardent opponent of regulations and
taxes that had absolutely nothing to do with smoking or cancer.
The book
demonstrates how easy it is to portray government actions to protect the
environment, economy, or human health as monstrous assaults on our wallets and
our lives.
It
would be fair to say that Nesbit has a score or two to settle with Big Tobacco,
after his years-long, bruising clash with them over regulating tobacco smoke.
It would also be fair to say that I do, too, with my dad and sister dying young
from smoking, both at age 62.
But the case Nesbit makes against Big Tobacco is
as compelling as the one I’d like to make on behalf of my family.
One
disappointment in the book: I would love to have heard from someone like Debbie
Dooley, the Atlanta-based Tea Party firebrand whose strange-bedfellows, pro
clean energy alliance with environmentalists has given electric utilities fits
here in the Southeast.
Dooley
has made great copy as a “Green Tea” advocate. If the Kochs et al. are
stage-managing the Tea Party, they’ve still left room on the decks for a few
loose cannons.
The
irrational furor that drives the Tea Party may have benefitted from years of
feeding and watering in K Street conference rooms, but the continuing ascent of
Donald Trump proves that it’s wrong to dismiss such a furor, and such a force.
Dooley, by the way, is an ardent Trump supporter and is therefore supporting a
candidate who’s vowed to dismantle all of her clean energy efforts.
Poison
Tea joins
several other books from recent years that could serve as a curriculum on how
American politics has gone wildly astray:
- Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2005) explains how huge interest groups turn their backs on their grassroots constituencies;
- Frank’s The Wrecking Crew (2008) describes how elected officials’ ineptitude became a political virtue, while
- Charles Pierce’s Idiot America (2009) illustrates how fear, paranoia, and outright ignorance can be fabulously monetized in today’s media culture;
- the aforementioned Merchants of Doubt;
- The Influence Machine (2015) by Alyssa Katz shines light on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s sprawling anti-regulatory reach; and
- finally, two more books on the Koch Brothers’ empire, Daniel Schulman’s Sons of Wichita (2014) and Jane Mayer’s recent release Dark Money.
I’ve just given you the world’s most distressing summer reading list.
Saying these books will help “make sense” of all this political absurdity is a
stretch, but reading them can’t possibly be any worse than following the
presidential campaign.
Jeff Nesbit’s book is an important contribution that
deepens our knowledge of the current trend toward ignorance.
For
questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.