James Carden on Scaremongering on Sunday

by | Jan 27, 2025

Minutes before the start of the Bills-Chiefs AFC championship game on Sunday, viewers were subjected to a risible 30 second ad paid for by a shadowy dark money PAC called National Interest [sic] Action. The ad serves as a kind of scare-mongering open letter to President Trump. A voiceover informs the President (and by extension, the millions who were tuning in to the highly anticipated AFC Championship game) in oh-so-grave tones that, he, Trump…

…has an opportunity to make America bold, prosperous and free…

Make us proud of the Red White and Blue…

Our allies and partners should trust us and know that we have their backs…

The axis of aggressors should fear us…

Our strength creates peace…

And peace leads to prosperity for all.

Not bad, if your target audience is made up entirely of Fourth Graders. The reaction from my better half was “What was that?”

What indeed.

National Interest Action, which paid for the 30 seconds of agit-prop, is registered with the FEC by Huckaby, Davis, Lisker Inc, an Alexandria,Virginia-based consulting firm specializing in political, financial and FEC compliance issues.

According to FEC records obtained by OpenSecrets.org, National Interest Action was active during the 2024 election spending $2,011,626 against Republicans and $1,518,288 for Republicans.

Which kind of Republicans? The kind that had its last hurrah in 2012 during the ill-fated Romney campaign. During a GOP primary race in Washington state, National Interest Action spend $1,459,370 against insurgent Jared Sessler a Navy veteran who won the endorsement of the House Freedom Caucus. It spend  $134,534 in support of the Romney-Republican Dan Newhouse, who cruised to reelection in November.  Newhouse has been a consistent supporter of the Biden administration’s war aims in Ukraine, calling on “our NATO and UN allies to act as swiftly as possible to sever all ties with Putin’s murderous regime.” “The free world,” said Newhouse, “depends on it.”

National Interest Action is hardly a beacon of transparency. A search of FEC record reveals that the dark money funders of the enterprise are determined to remain in the shadows. Its website, NationalInterestAction.com is a skeleton site with zero information.

An ad-buy minutes prior to the AFC title game would have required significant expenditures; one estimate shows that a 30-second ad for NFL’s Sunday Night Football costs nearly $900,000.

James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.