What Did The Donations Pay For?

On Saturday The Daily Caller reported the following:

President Joe Biden rode a record-breaking $145 million in “dark money” donations into the White House, Bloomberg News reported Saturday.

“Dark money” is donations from anonymous donors to outside groups backing a given candidate. Biden’s $145 million is the all-time record for a candidate challenging an incumbent president, according to Bloomberg. Former President Donald Trump received $28 million from such donations.

…Biden’s count tops former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s $113 million in dark money donations from his 2012 challenge to President Barack Obama.

Throughout the entire 2020 campaign season, Trump’s donations totaled $1.96 billion, compared to Biden’s $1.69 billion through November 23. Trump received a heavy fundraising boost between October 15 and November 23 thanks to his challenge to the results of the election.

That’s an awful lot of money to spend on an election. It seems to me that the money would have been better spent dealing with America’s budget deficit.

This Is Not Helpful To Anyone

Breitbart reported the following yesterday:

A Democrat-aligned Super PAC announced on Tuesday that it will spend $5 million on negative ads targeting President Trump’s response to the coronavirus.

Why not spend $5 million on encouraging people to take precautions to avoid getting the virus or to help those most impacted by the financial distress caused by the virus?

The article continues:

Acronym owns the technology firm Shadow, Inc., which was responsible for developing the infamous app used in the chaotic Iowa caucuses. Notably, the firm’s founder and CEO, Tara McGowan, “worked for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and previously served as the digital director for NextGen America, a progressive organization founded by presidential candidate Tom Steyer,” as RealClearPolitics noted.

Acronym is funded by the “liberal dark money group” New Venture Fund, which is “part of a larger group called Arabella Advisors, which provides philanthropic guidance and manages four nonprofits,” according to the nonpartisan ethics watchdog group Americans for Public Trust. Those also include the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund.

The financial web, however, goes far beyond those connections. The political group American Bridge, which was founded by David Brock — a close ally of the Clintons and founder of Media Matters for America — is also involved in the overarching efforts to spread misinformation on President Trump’s response to the coronavirus and further politicize the crisis.

“American Bridge’s network of nonprofits received funding in 2018 from New Venture Fund, as well as another Arabella group called Sixteen Thirty Fund,” Americans for Public Trust reports.

The Post notes that American Bridge has been running political advertisements on Trump’s response to the crisis in key swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. According to the Post, the group signaled that more was coming, including an ad focusing on “‘Trump’s incompetence,’ including ‘clips of Trump himself downplaying the crisis.’”

“Our job is to hold Donald Trump accountable, and we have no plans to let up, particularly with a focus on economic issues as we’ve done to date,” American Bridge President Bradley Beychok said, according to the outlet.

He added that the group is “not going to give him [Trump] a pass for bungling the government’s response to this pandemic.”

This PAC is not helping anyone. At a time when reliable information is critical, this group, along with their allies in the mainstream media, are spreading fake news. I posted three stories (here, here, and here) in the past week that cited misreporting by the media regarding the coronavirus. All three stories were inaccurate and framed in a way to make either the President or the Republicans look bad. At a time when Americans need to work together to get through a crisis, spending $5 million on a political hit-job is not constructive.

 

I Guess Practicing What You Preach Is Just Not In Style Anymore

We have heard a lot of Democrats protesting the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court and also demanding that all groups making political donations be required to name their donors.

Breitbart.com reported yesterday:

Open Secrets describes “dark money organizations” as “501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors.” Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to pass the DISCLOSE Act, which would “require unions, nonprofits and corporate interest groups that spend $10,000 or more during an election cycle to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more.”

Open Secrets posted two interesting graphs yesterday: saveddarkmoney2

darkmoneyConsidering that the IRS targeted conservative groups and asked them to reveal their donors (which is against the law), I find this graph very interesting. Maybe they were targeting the wrong people.

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