The Infernal Triangle: The Zeal of the Convert

Matthew Sheffield is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. His father had rebelled against the Mormonism of his youth, resentful of how it had shed its original, 19th-century strangeness. So he invented his own version, one in which he had direct prophetic access to the supernatural realm—for instance, the time Satan tempted him to become gay. He spent several years beseeching God, walking around in the mountains above the University of Utah, nearly killing himself several times from starvation.

The elder Sheffield was a professor of classical guitar, a brilliant composer beloved by the great Andrés Segovia. God commanded him to abandon his job, pack up his growing family, and become an itinerant street musician instead. “There were times we were homeless,” Matthew Sheffield told me. “One of my brothers was born in a tent. My mother gave birth to one of my other brothers by herself, in our apartment, with two kids around.”

He corrects himself: “No, three kids. Right next to her.”

Busking became a family profession. (“The Dark Osmonds,” I propose. “Yeah,” Matthew replies, “but we were classical.” He played French horn.) He grew interested in politics, in part from family connections (a grandfather was the Republican whip in the Utah state Senate), in part because the family did a lot of performing in the streets of Washington, D.C., because it was easy to scavenge food that vendors on the Mall threw away.

He and a brother developed computer proficiency, and he picked up a college education in dribs and drabs. He has a hard time remembering which of the nine universities he attended he was attending when he developed the first college newspaper website. He was around 20, and still on the road with his family, when he and his brother decided that CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather was too mean to Kenneth Starr, the special counsel investigating Bill Clinton. His brother came up with the idea to put some quotes of Rather’s on the internet to reveal his stealth liberalism. Matt said they should aim higher, and build a comprehensive website. So they did. “But we were afraid to put our names on it because we were two college kids. So we didn’t. And, um, the CBS people accused us of being a secret operation funded by Republican donors!”

The exclamation is a rare touch. He explained the rest nonchalantly at the Szechuan restaurant where we’re lunching in Chicago’s South Loop during the Democratic convention. Sheffield’s typical mien is sardonic bemusement at the strangeness of the world he managed to escape—as when he explains a second reason why he and his brother kept themselves hidden.

“Also, we were afraid because my mom had a dream that Bill Clinton was going to try to kill us.”

Sheffield’s faculty profile at the Leadership Institute, a right-wing clearinghouse for what they call “journalism training,” is no longer online, but it had noted that RatherBiased.com was “credited by the New York Times as being the most influential blog in taking down Dan Rather during the famous ‘Memogate’ scandal. Since that time, Matt has worked with … groups such as the Media Research Center where he created NewsBusters, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite blog. He also works with the Washington Examiner, helping them increase their traffic by over 600 percent to over a million visitors per month.”

Sheffield has long since become a committed leftist. I’m writing about him not just because he fascinates me. I’m writing about him because the lessons he learned on the road to becoming a right-wing media operative, and what he has learned since in his almost entirely frustrated efforts to impart those lessons to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, are so crucial for all of us to know.

SHEFFIELD’S CAREER ON THE RIGHT was rather doomed from the start. Because he cared about the truth.

His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.

In 2007, he joined Brent Bozell III’s Media Research Center, because that’s where the money was. He started NewsBusters, the site Limbaugh loved, which ferreted out alleged liberal media bias. NewsBusters would run pieces about Michelle Obama, “and we’d have to shut off the comments because they were too disgusting.”

RatherBiased, Sheffield notes, got all that New York Times attention because “it was completely accurate in every way. We didn’t use inflammatory language; we didn’t even state any political opinions.” No room for that in his next lunge up the right’s greasy pole. “I was horrified a lot of the time, quite honestly. You know when Ted Cruz was doing his first government shutdown attempt? I was in meetings about how we should cover the media’s coverage. I said, ‘Well, it’s an objectively stupid idea. It’s not unfair for the media to say that this is destabilizing and extreme and absurd.’”

My response is a guffaw, his a sardonic chuckle. “Uh, yeah. They looked at me like I had suggested they grow a third eye or something.”

THERE WAS A SECOND REASON Matthew Sheffield did not fit the conservative movement mold. “Our family musical group never really got off the ground. So we were beginning to wonder whether, you know, our father was as divinely led as he told us.” So he became an atheist. And you could only get so far in the conservative world without being religious, or at least paying religion obsequious tribute. “What’s her name, S.E. Cupp? She actually wrote an entire book saying, ‘Well, I’m not religious but I sure wish I was.’ That was her way of trying to get on the gravy train. And I wasn’t willing to do that.”

The consequences are more than theological. When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job.

Sheffield became the first managing editor of the Washington Examiner. It’s now a website. But the project, handsomely funded by a right-wing billionaire, began in 2005 as a suite of local daily tabloids in several cities, as a strategy to move the media environment to the right by making readers feel like they were reading normal news in a normal local newspaper. “The people who I was recruiting and were writing for me often had no concept of verifying a story … Because religious fundamentalists don’t need that.” Conservatives always descend from some sacred, impregnable prior truth. As Sheffield says: “The reasoning is about affirming the concept.”

Sheffield tells a story from the Obama era about the federal program known as “Cash for Clunkers,” a rather thoughtful policy win-win that got inefficient cars off the road, stimulated new auto sales, and put cash in folks’ pocket after the financial crash. It was administered through car dealers. Someone sent the Examiner a tip that the Obama administration was discriminating against Republican car dealers. “But the thing is, almost all car dealers are Republican. It’s almost impossible to discriminate against Republican car dealers and have that program!” He nonetheless farmed it out to a young colleague, just in case. “You know: ‘This could be a really hot story if it’s true.’”

Two hours later, the kid comes up to him, exultant: “Yes! I got a Drudge link!”

“I was like, ‘Wait, for what?’ And he’s like, ‘That story you gave me.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, did you …verify it at all?’”

Right there, I put down the cumin lamb and leaned in. This was the real shit.

“And he’s like, ‘It had everything we needed right there!’ And of course it came out almost immediately that it was all bullshit. We had to pull the article. But ultimately, the fact that I believed in empirical reasoning was what destined me to flee. It meant I was not a good fit.”

THE SHUDDER INTO FULL APOSTASY came on the next rung up the ladder. He was working on a right-leaning comedy show, a kind of SNL “Weekend Update” rip-off, aiming for syndication on broadcast TV. It actually wasn’t terrible. (Here’s a segment covering Donald Trump and Barack Obama’s infamous convergence at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.)

“We actually got more favorable coverage from the mainstream media than the right-wing media. The right-wing media didn’t like us because it wasn’t nasty enough.” (It was plenty nasty: Grok the joke about Sharia law.) But for Sheffield’s team, not-as-nasty was the feature, not the bug. That was the pitch they made for the better part of a year to, among others, the Koch organization: “We’re going for a broadcast audience here. We’re going for Jay Leno, but slightly more conservative.” That, he argued, was the missing piece of the puzzle to keep conservatism a thriving concern: to build and keep a majority coalition. He also pointed out that without conservative-dominated media organizations that aspired to some degree of mainstream credibility, like the sort he built with RatherBiased.com, they’d lose all the smart young talent, “because the only paths available to them are to become talk radio hosts or crazy bloggers.”

This pitch failed. “They thought it didn’t go hard enough after the Democrats.” This is conservatism’s authoritarian ratchet in action: the way the movement contains no mechanism for moderation—only for ever-greater extremism.

The last straw was when Sheffield learned about a lawsuit evangelicals filed against a liberal church in North Carolina, before the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, that was blessing gay unions. “I was just horrified at all the awful things they were saying, and how anti-American they were, how they literally don’t believe in freedom of religion,” he said. The conservatives’ argument was: “Unless you’re historically rooted in your doctrines, you don’t have religious freedoms.”

I’d never heard of that, but it doesn’t surprise me, having written about the nascent religious right’s arguments in the late 1970s about why the state had no right to regulate churches at all, whether it came to building codes or segregation laws. They published law review articles saying that the Founders intended only Christian schools to have public legitimacy, that in fact non-Christian schools violated the First Amendment because they discriminated against Christians by inculcating a “state religion,” which was “secular humanism.”

Liberals tend to maintain a lingering sentimental attachment to the idea that people calling themselves “Christians” are, well, Christian as the word is commonly understood outside the evangelical world. Faith, hope, and charity, turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. The people who most clearly understand and articulate their imperialist designs for the rest of us tend to be apostates like Sheffield, Matt Sitman, and Frank Schaeffer.

Exiles, Bertolt Brecht suggests, make the best dialecticians. They refuse protective sentimentality toward the world they left behind. Thus Sheffield. “I was looking at polling and demographics that younger people do not believe in fundamentalist religion, that many of them are explicitly nonreligious; we have to change to have a future, to be relevant to people. If we actually want to serve people, we have to change for them.” That’s when the whole thing collapsed. “I realized that they don’t actually want to serve the public.”

I ask him to explain to liberals for whom this makes no sense how someone can be interested in the profession we after all call “public service” and not be interested in serving the public.

He replies, “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”

SHEFFIELD SHOULD BE MUCH BETTER KNOWN. You can read the exposés he wrote in Salon during the Trump presidency and his reporting from The Hill after that, or listen to his ambitious podcast theorizing how change-making works, or see him pop up in the media from time to time as a disinformation expert. But like my friend David Neiwert, the calls aren’t coming from the people who really need to understand what we’re up against, like strategists in the Democratic Party and the media voices to whom they pay most attention.

He’s a little bitter about it—“I haven’t been invited on MSNBC once”—but that’s OK; so am I, and so should you be. A party opposing authoritarianism ignoring resources like this is leaving money on the table.

“There are a lot of people like me. I have ten million-plus Twitter engagements every month. People like what I’m saying. But it goes back to that liberal thing—that they think the Republicans can be saved. They can’t be saved.”

Maybe that bluntness limits his impact. That sentimentality that there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, remains oh so seductive. Sheffield finally grasped the impossibility of Republican redemption during the high tide of Barack Obama’s fervor imploring Democrats to believe in the existence of Republicans of good faith—and that once he was re-elected, “the fever will break,” and “we can start getting some cooperation again.”

That wasn’t true then. And to believe it is bonkerdoodles now.

The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”

Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?

“That’s right. There’s nothing that these people will do to compromise with you.”

The fever is not going to break?

He said it, I didn’t: “They have to be broken.”