An Agent of Israel, the Bolloré Media Empire, and the Trump family
Israel, Havas (the Bolloré Group), a man at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Trump family, and a conservative Christian media group walk into a boat together. Who falls overbord?
Salem Media Group (SMG) is a conservative Christian media conglomerate founded in 1974 and traded on the OTC markets — quiet enough to avoid scrutiny, large enough to reshape a nation’s political conversation.
SMG produces a remarkable gallery of podcasts: the Charlie Kirk Show (still going strong, apparently impervious even to the assassination of Turning Point USA’s founder), the Larry Elder Show (former Republican candidate for Governor of California), The Right View with Lara Trump (well, well, well), the Dinesh D’Souza Show (you can’t be serious), America First with Sebastian Gorka (ah yes — the current Deputy National Security Advisor and Trump’s counterterrorism czar, moonlighting as a podcaster), and many more.
According to the last available annual report, SMG employs nearly 1,500 people, owns and operates 95 radio stations in major metropolitan markets, and syndicates its programming to approximately 2,700 affiliated stations.
SMG’s Director of Strategy is one Brad Parscale — Trump’s digital director during the 2016 campaign. Remember that name. It comes back.
Do you recall Cambridge Analytica? The British data-harvesting outfit that, in 2016, quietly stole the personal data of 87 million American Facebook users on behalf of the Trump campaign — co-founded by a certain Steve Bannon (what a small world)?
Because here’s how that particular rabbit hole was dug: it was on Bannon’s advice that Robert Mercer — one of the most invisible and most powerful figures in American conservative politics — created Cambridge Analytica in 2013, along with its Canadian subsidiary AggregateIQ. Both were branches of the British SCL Group, a firm specializing in strategic communications combining psychometrics, quantitative data processing, and artificial intelligence.
Mercer had already bought Breitbart News in 2012 — again on Bannon’s recommendation, the same Bannon who had run the outlet since its founding in 2007.
And Brad Parscale? He sits squarely at the center of the Cambridge Analytica affair. It was none other than Jared Kushner who personally recommended Parscale hire the firm — which raises no questions whatsoever, given that Mercer was hardly a major Trump campaign donor, and Bannon was certainly not a grey eminence of that campaign. The collaboration was so intimate that up to 13 Cambridge Analytica employees relocated full-time to Parscale’s offices in San Antonio, Texas at the height of the 2016 campaign.
