At the Owl’s Nest, visitors pass through pillars crowned by a pair of owl statues, their wings outstretched as if taking flight. People who’ve been inside describe a pistol range, a series of secret passages, and an octagonal tower holding a two- story library.
When Robinson visited, Mercer led him to the basement, where he keeps his model train; it cost about $2.7 million, according to a lawsuit brought by Mercer against its designer, and depicts a swath of the Hudson Valley. A visitor can sit in a mock-up of a steam locomotive’s cab to control the train. The windshield shows the view from a video camera on the tiny engine on the track below.
Robinson saw Mercer again last August, at a DoubleTree airport hotel outside of Los Angeles. A group called Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, of which Robinson is a longtime member, was holding its 33rd annual meeting. Founded to promote civil defense during the Cold War, it’s transformed over the years into a forum on many of the same fringe-science topics that Robinson covers in his newsletter. It’s been run for decades by Robinson’s friend Orient, the Arizona physician. Attacks on mainstream climate science are a staple, but the range of material is broad. One recent presentation spun a theory about links between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the deaths of his brother and son.
The weekend kicked off with a tour of the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. At the DoubleTree, one speaker warned that the aim of Obamacare was to collapse the U.S. health-care system and recommended that the audience start stockpiling medications and finding doctors who would work for cash. Another speaker discussed the controversial theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health. A retired heart surgeon from Seattle spent almost an hour arguing that HIV does not cause AIDS; rather, he said, the link was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”
In an interview, Orient says she knows little about Mercer other than that he’s attended several of the conferences and has been a “generous” donor to them. In addition to arranging the events, Orient heads a separate group that opposes government involvement in health care, and she writes frequently in the far-right media. In December she posted an article about the San Bernardino killings, suggesting that the government failed to stop the attacks because it’s “on the other side.”
At the DoubleTree, a surprising number of strands from Mercer’s interests intersected. Breitbart.com, the populist website he funds, dispatched a reporter to cover the meeting. The Heartland Institute, a climate-skeptic think tank to which he’s given more than $4 million, sent its science director to present his plan to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Another speaker warned of the dangers of Agenda 21, the UN program that’s a frequent target of a Mercer-funded activist. George Gilder, a techno-evangelist and bitcoin advocate who recently wrote a monograph for the Mercer-funded gold-standard project, was on hand. And of course there was Robinson, who shared a lunch table with Robert and Rebekah Mercer. As usual, he says, Robert Mercer didn’t have much to say.
A month after the California conference, the Mercers headed to Jackson Hole. Every summer top officials at the Federal Reserve gather in the Wyoming resort community with many of the world’s top economists to discuss monetary policy. But the Mercers went instead to the Jackson Hole Summit, a “counter- conference” they funded through a nonprofit group called the American Principles Project. The summit’s purpose was to question the very purpose of the Fed, calling for an end to government involvement in the money supply and a return to the gold standard. Steve Lonegan, an APP activist from New Jersey, opened the event by waving a dollar bill in the air. “Today, my friends, this little piece of paper in our pocket is manipulated, its value determined, and undermined routinely, by a bunch of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are meeting right now a few miles away,” he said. “America needs to wake up to this threat!”
The U.S. turned away from the gold standard during the Great Depression and dropped its last links in 1971. It’s difficult to find a mainstream economist who advocates for it; a 2012 survey of economists at top U.S. universities failed to turn up a single supporter. Yet it’s a particular interest of Mercer’s, say several people who’ve discussed the matter with him.
Mercer is also a passionate critic of a central element of the modern financial system known as fractional reserve banking, these people said. Essentially, it’s the practice of banks lending out their depositors’ money to others. Banks have been doing this for hundreds of years, but a few out-of-the- mainstream economists consider it a form of fraud—akin to conjuring currency out of thin air. According to one associate, a thinker said to be influential with Mercer is Murray Rothbard, the late economist who called the modern banking system “a shell game, a Ponzi scheme.” It’s unclear how Mercer’s views on the banking system square with his hedge fund activities; it emerged in the Senate tax investigation that Renaissance, to boost returns, sometimes sought leverage of as much as 20 times the value of its assets from giant banks such as Barclays.