#Dark Money

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alex Nguyen at Mother Jones:

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands. This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.) One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.”  Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

[...] In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false.  As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters.  Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin. 

A Wall Street Journal reports that right-wing X owner Elon Musk has been funding anti-immigrant propaganda, including funding $50M to right-wing group linked to Stephen Miller called Citizens For Sanity (or more accurately, Citizens For Insanity).

[canadianabroadvery]

Finance giants like Fidelity and Schwab are pushing “donor-advised funds” that enable the ultrawealthy to funnel cash to far-right extremist groups anonymously under the guise of charitable giving. Project 2025 has benefited enormously.

[eretzyisrael]

by Robert Williams

In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, made 13 demands of Qatar: "to cut off relations with Iran, shutter Al Jazeera, and stop granting Qatari citizenship to other countries' exiled oppositionists." They subsequently cut ties with Qatar over its failure to agree to any of the demands, including ending its support for terrorism, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera.

The Saudi state-run news agency SPA said at the time:

"[Qatar] embraces multiple terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at disturbing stability in the region, including the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS [Islamic State] and al-Qaeda, and promotes the message and schemes of these groups through their media constantly,"

This is the kind of influence that US universities and colleges are more than happy to see on their campuses in exchange for billions of dollars in Qatari donations. According to ISGAP:

"[F]oreign donations from Qatar, especially, have had a substantial impact on fomenting growing levels of antisemitic discourse and campus politics at US universities, as well as growing support for anti-democratic values within these institutions of higher education."

In November 2023 ISGAP published a report, "The Corruption of the American Mind: How concealed foreign funding of higher education in the United States predicts the erosion of democratic values and antisemitic sentiment on campus." It found that there is a direct correlation between antisemitism and censored speech on campus and undocumented contributions from foreign governments, notably Qatar. According to the report:

"At least 100 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian. "In institutions receiving such undocumented money: "Speech intolerance—manifesting as campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate speakers and scholars—was higher at institutions that received undocumented money from foreign regimes."

Qatar makes it possible for Ivy League universities to claim that they receive no funds from the Qatari state, because the donations are funneled through the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, a not-for-profit organization established in 1995 by the Emir of Qatar. This ensures that the foundation can identify itself as a private organization, which enables Qatar to conceal its state funding as private donations.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Clarence Thomas and the generosity of a far-right dark-money billionaire

Clarence Thomas has set some important precedents in his career as a Supreme Court justice — for example, the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/01/30-years-after-her-testimony-anita-hill-still-wants-something-from-joe-biden-514884

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Today, Thomas continues to steer the court into new territory — for example, he’s interested in banning same-sex marriage again:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/thomas-constitutional-rights-00042256

And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair:

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089595933/legal-ethics-experts-agree-justice-thomas-must-recuse-in-insurrection-cases

Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/25/consequentialism/#dotards-in-robes

Today, Propublica published an expose on the vast fortune in secret gifts bestowed upon Thomas by the billionare GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, who is also one the most significant funders of political campaigns that put business before Thomas and the Supreme Court:

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow

The story, reported by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski is a masterwork of shoe-leather investigative journalism, drawing on aviation records, social media posts and other “open source” intelligence to expose the illegal, off-the-books “gifts” from a billionaire to an unaccountable Supreme Court justice with a lifetime appointment.

Here are a two of those gifts: a private jet/superyacht jaunt around Indonesia valued at $500,000; and a $500,000 gift to Ginni Thomas’s Tea Party group (which pays Ginni Thomas $120,000/year).

On top of that are gifts that are literally priceless: decades’ worth of summer vacations at Camp Topridge, Crow’s private estate, with its waterfall, great hall, private chefs, 25 fireplaces, thee boathouses, clay tennis court, batting range, 1950s-style soda fountain and full-scale reproduction of Hagrid’s hut.

Summer retreats to Topridge allow business leaders like Leonard Leo — the Federalist Society bankroller and mastermind who set Trump up to pack the Supreme Court — to coordinate in private with Thomas:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

They also allow top execs from PWC, Verizon and other corporations who may have business before the court to establish a warm, collegial relationship with a judge whose decisions can make billions for their employers. In its reporting, Propublica points out that Thomas got to hang out on Crow’s superyacht with Mark Paoletta, who was then general counsel for Trump’s OMB, and who has opposed any tightening of ethics rules for Supreme Court judges: “there is nothing wrong with ethics or recusals at the Supreme Court.”

Crow and Thomas also hobnob together at Crow’s Texas ranch, and at the Bohemian Grove, the Bay Area’s ultra-luxe retreat for rich creeps. Crow bought Thomas a private superyacht cruise through New Zealand, another through the Greek islands, and a river trip around Savannah, GA. He also traveled around the country on Crow’s private jet — even a short private jet trip is valued around $70,000.

Crow also makes many donations on Thomas’s behalf, from a $105,000 donation to Yale Law School for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund” to paying for a 7 foot tall, 1,800 lb bronze statue of the nun who taught Thomas in the eighth grade, which now stands in a New York Catholic cemetery.

This is without precedent. No Supreme Court justice in US history received comparable gifts during their tenure on the bench. Federal judges quoted in the story call it “incomprehensible,” noting that US judges bend over backwards not to owe anyone any favors, going so far as to book restaurant reservations without using their titles.

Virginia Canter, a former US government ethics lawyer of bipartisan experience said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations,” adding “it makes my heart sink.”

The Supreme Court’s own code of ethics prohibits justices from engaging in conduct that gives rise to the “appearance of impropriety,” but the code is “consultative,” and there are no penalties for violating it. But US judicial officers — including Thomas — are legally required to disclose things like private jet trips. Thomas did not. In general, justices must report any gift valued at more than $415, where a gift is “anything of value.” This includes instances in which a gift is given by a corporation whose owner is the true giver.

Crow is a Red Scare-haunted plutocrat who says his greatest fear is “Marxism.” He was a key donor to the anti-tax extremists at the Club For Growth, and has served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute — climate deniers who also claimed that smoking didn’t cause cancer — for 25 years.

Crow is a proud dark-money source, too, whose $10m in acknowledged donations to Republican causes and candidates are only the tip of the iceberg, next to the dark money he has provided to groups he declines to name, telling the New York Times, “I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

Crow claims that the vast sums he’s lavished on Thomas — who, again, presides over the test cases that Crow is helping to put before him — are just “hospitality.” Crow called the private retreats with business leaders and top government officials “gatherings of friends,” and added that he was “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas” while at his private estates or on his superyacht or private plane.

For his part, Thomas publicly maintains that he hates luxury. In a Crow-financed documentary about Thomas’s life, Thomas tells the camera, “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

Judges often have to make determinations about conflicts of interest, and lawyers have an entire practice devoted to preventing conflicts from arising. I doubt whether Thomas himself would consent to have a dispute of his own tried in front of a judge who had received millions in gifts from his opponent.

The Supreme Court’s power comes from its legitimacy. The project of delegitimizing the court started with the right, and Democrats have been loathe to participate in any activity that would worsen the court’s reputation. As a result, the business lobby and authoritarian politicians have had free rein to turn the court into a weapon for attacking American workers, American women, and LGBTQ people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When the Supreme Court blocked all of FDR’s New Deal policies — which were wildly popular — FDR responded by proposing age limits for Supreme Court judges. When the Supremes refused to contemplate this, FDR asked Congress for a law allowing him to appoint one new Supreme Court judge for every judge who should retire but wouldn’t.

As the vote on this bill grew nearer, the Supremes reversed themselves, voting to uphold the policies they’d struck down in their previous session. They knew that their legitimacy was all they had, and when a brave president stood up to their bullying, they caved.

https://theconversation.com/packing-the-court-amid-national-crises-lincoln-and-his-republicans-remade-the-supreme-court-to-fit-their-agenda-147139

The Supreme Court has moved America further away from the ideals of pluralistic democracy than we can even fathom, and they’re just getting started. They are taking a wrecking ball to the lives of anyone who isn’t a wealthy conservative, and they’re doing it while accepting a fortune in bribes from American oligarchs.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Mr. Kjetil Ree (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Supreme_Court.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An altered image of Clarence Thomas, standing in gilded judicial robes on the steps of the Supreme Court. Looming over the court is a line-drawing of a business-man with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By Daniel J. Samet

AIPAC isn’t the reason why Bowman or other anti-Israel progressives lose.

They’re being ousted from office because their loony views, including but not limited to anti-Zionism, are far out of step with their districts.

AIPAC, which has been around since 1963, is a convenient target for their anti-Israel grievances.

The group has long taken flak from opponents who argue that it nefariously influences American policy, but its critics are mistaken.      

Take campaign contributions, for which AIPAC is often attacked: AIPAC has the same First Amendment rights that all Americans do.

One wonders why this one group, whose staff and supporters are significantly Jewish, is so criticized for backing candidates who support the world’s sole Jewish state.

And AIPAC is far from the nation’s most prolific campaign contributor: According to Open Secrets, it has been outspent by 11 other political action committees this election cycle.

When was the last time you heard someone deplore the machinations of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, for example?

If AIPAC-haters had any interest in being honest, they would acknowledge that the group is hardly the only one to give money to politicians it supports.

And the money AIPAC spends often doesn’t bear fruit — in this and past years, it has backed its fair share of losing congressional candidates.

Some of AIPAC’s fiercest critics, like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), remain in office.

[rjzimmerman]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse tells it like it is: 'one crew, one plan, one cancer in the body politic'. (Daily Kos)

I'm cutting and pasting this text from one of today's Daily Kos newsletters that land in my inbox. I think that Senator Whitehouse is possibly the smartest senator among the 100. He's a Democrat from Rhode Island and always has the smartest and bravest observations when matters are particularly ugly.

"Below is an unrolled string of tweets from Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about our political predicament. More of our Senators should be talking like this and joining Whitehouse’s relentless attacks on the corruption and authoritarianism eating away at democracy. 

Our current situation should give Dems a rejuvenating chance to focus better on fixing what’s gone wrong in America.

We face three huge threats: persistent internal attacks on our democracy, unbridled climate upheaval, and a captured Court with some deeply corrupt justices

Behind each threat is dark money; massive anonymous political spending by special interests who hide their identities from the public.

The political class has reoriented itself to this new reality, pivoting to the big secret spenders. Voters notice they’re not so important anymore. An entire dark-money ecosystem has been spawned, with front groups, ‘Donors Trusts,’ coordinating 501c3s and c4s, and superPACs.

This whole filthy bestiary of influence is new (or refocused and expanded) since Citizens United. It didn’t used to be this way; it doesn’t have to be this way.

Democrats keep voting to get rid of dark money, and Republicans keep voting to protect dark money, but voters have no idea. We basically haven’t told them.

Which is pathetic because voters hate dark money with a passion, Republicans, independents and Democrats alike. Polling is off the charts.

(When done, that is; too often pollsters blow the dust each year off their polling questions from the ‘90s and this question doesn’t get asked!)

Climate change is out of control because of a massive dark-money politics and propaganda operation run by the fossil fuel industry.

Before Citizens United, climate was a bipartisan concern (see McCain 2008 platform); fossil-fuel dark money killed bipartisanship.

The Court was captured by a dark-money operation funded by creepy polluter billionaires and managed by their creepy minion Leonard Leo.

The ‘amenable’ justices are instructed via coordinated flotillas of dark-money amici curiae, with correlation near perfect between instruction and result.

Republicans are complicit in all this because the dark money behind these schemes is also the dark money billions behind their political operations.

It’s a trifecta; dark money is behind climate denial, Court capture and corruption of Congress — one crew, one plan, one cancer in the body politic.

Democrats should be blowing the whistle on the whole dark-money rot.It explains so much, it has obvious villains, and it has the added benefit of being true.

We are in a war for our future and we should behave that way.

[agentfascinateur]

The illegal "spiritual battle" over the US elections

A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump. These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.

The reporting by ProPublica and Documented “casts serious doubt on this organization’s status as a 501(c)(3) organization,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.

“I think it’s across the line without a question,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor.

[noovva]

Engin Akyürek as Ömer Demir / Kara Para Aşk 🩶

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Right-wing dark money activist Leonard Leo launches $1BN crusade to "‘crush" liberal America

Alex Rogers at Financial Times:

The conservative activist who led the crusade to overhaul the US legal system is making a $1bn push to “crush liberal dominance” across corporate America and in the country’s news and entertainment sectors. In a rare interview, Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, said his non-profit advocacy group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was ready to confront the private sector in addition to the government. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times. “Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers,” he said.

Leo has spent more than two decades at the influential Federalist Society, guiding conservative judges into the federal courts and the Supreme Court itself. In 2018, conservative justice Clarence Thomas joked that Leo was the third most important person in the world. Leo’s efforts culminated under Trump’s presidency, when three Federalist Society-backed judges were appointed to give conservatives on the Supreme Court a 6-3 supermajority, and profound influence over US law. The court has since then ruled to overturn the right to an abortion, among other long-sought rightwing causes. In 2020, after Trump lost the election, Leo stepped back from running the daily operations of the Federalist Society, while remaining its co-chair. The following year, Leo founded Marble, with a $1.6bn donation from electronic device manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, to be a counterweight to what he said was “dark money” of the left. He spent about $600mn in its first three years, according to public financial disclosures.

Leo said his goal was to find “very leveraged, impactful ways of reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilisation”. The $1bn money machine is now funding the conservative mission against private institutions, opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, climate and social concerns in investing and the “debanking” of politically conservative customers, in addition to taking on the public sector. The non-profit is increasingly interested in launching campaigns against “woke” banks and China-friendly companies involved in everything from food production to autonomous vehicles in the US and potentially Europe. Leo also intends to invest in a US local media company in the next 12 months, although he has not decided which, and is building conservative coalitions through groups such as Teneo Network, a club with chapters across the country. He also confirmed that Marble had since 2021 helped fund organisations that launched campaigns against companies with DEI, ESG and other initiatives, including BlackRock, Vanguard, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, State Farm, Major League Baseball and Ticketmaster.

The Financial Times interviewed right-wing dark money activist Leonard Leo, as he announced plans to launch a $1BN crusade to "‘crush" liberal America.

Leo has hinted that he’ll invest in an unnamed American media company within the next year.

[wardsutton]

My new cartoon up at The Boston Globe now:

[imkeepinit]

[eretzyisrael]

BY PARK MACDOUGALD

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

WOL’s role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) “sister,” NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in

People on the right have some really weird ideas about their ideological enemies: that we’re “groomers,” that we’re secretly on some billionaire’s payroll, that we hijacked the education system to promulgate revisionist histories, that we steal elections, and, of course, that we are secretly plotting to take over America and subjugate them.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/10/teneo/#i-grasp

The weirdest thing about this is that it’s the right that engages in revisionist race-history:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-myth-of-the-happy-slave-explained

And it’s the right who stole a presidency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

Election-rigging is a right-wing specialty:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork

It’s the right who pay for fake grassroots activism:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/raising-them-right-far-right-fight-college-campus-1234636392/

Any time some right-wing politician comes out against queers and calls them groomers, chances are good that he’s spending his free time on Instagram, sending fire emojis to naked boys:

https://www.ibtimes.sg/randy-mcnally-tennessees-anti-lgbtq-lt-gov-caught-liking-commenting-young-gay-mans-racy-69364

That’s especially true when we’re talking about evangelical youth pastors:

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-texas-pastors-charged-abusing-children-1765910

It’s almost like that old playground rebuttal, “I know you are but what am I?” contains a deep political truth:

https://doctorow.medium.com/takes-one-to-know-one-104d7d749408

Of all the absurd libels of the right, the weirdest one is that leftists are secretly funded by woke billionaires spending dark money to foment the overthrow of the USA. The idea of “leftist billionaire” is laughable on its face: how did this imaginary billionaire make their billions while paying a living wage and providing decent working conditions?

But it’s easy to understand how a group of people who are so positively *aslosh* in dark money — people whose every political maneuver is a carefully planned scheme to separate terrified xenophobes and rubes from their money — for “alternative” covid therapies, apocalypse-ready MREs, “sound money” gold coins, and so. much. culture. war. nonsense.

What I’m trying to say is: when the right accuses the left of being driven by cabals of shadowy, crepulent billionaires and their pathetic lickspittle Renfields, it is because the right is indeed in the thrall of those crepulent billionaires.

Meet Leonard Leo, a crepulent, shadowy billionaire. Leo was last seen around these parts when he was revealed to have been the bagman behind the ultradark money group Judicial Crisis Network. After spending $27m to block confirmation for Obama’s SCOTUS pick, Merrick Garland, they spent tens of millions more on campaigns to seat Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. Coney Barrett was seated thanks to a $15.9m campaign to make an unqualified, unhinged ideologue seem like a viable lifetime member of the highest court in the land:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

Leo controls the Judicial Crisis Network, which worked with the Federalist Society to allow Trump to appoint a whopping 28% of all US federal judges — lifetime appointments for slavering Renfields who’ll follow his political lead. Witness the firepower of a fully operational billionaire.

Leo’s post-Trump side-hustle is a “Federalist Society for everything” — a secretive, lavishly funded cabal aimed at taking over campuses, corporations, news outlets with an army of “under 40s” conservative operatives. It’s called Teneo, and it was a secret — until its internal memos, videos and other materials leaked to Propublica.

Propublica’s Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein collaborated with Documented’s Nick Surgey to report out the leaks, describing how Teneo when from “a dinner club with partisan overtones” to a dark-money juggernaut whose annual donations grew by leaps and bounds (2017, $750k; 2020, $2.3m; 2021, $5m):

https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-teneo-videos-documents

These financial good fortunes are not the result of excited small-money donors hoping to help Teneo with its good works — it’s a handful of ultra-wealthy sociopaths hoping to use a minority of willing lackeys to project their will over all of us.

Teneo’s network members are a Monster’s Manual of the wildest wingnuts in public life, from Josh Hawley (who wrote its founding manifesto) to JD Vance to Elise Stefanik to BenShapiro to three of Ron DeSantis’s top aides. Also: federal judge who struck down Biden’s mask mandate and the heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA.

The stated goal of Teneo founder Evan Baehr (a tech bro turned conservative organizer) was for Teneo members to infiltrate “the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”

In a leaked video, Baehr identifies the “woke” enemy he seeks to vanquish, describing a hypothetical meeting between “a billionaire hedge funder, a film producer, a Harvard professor and a New York Times writer.” These four cook up a plan to give middle-school kids “free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government.” The filmmaker promises to make a documentary to support the project. The Harvard professor promises to falsify studies to reassure people that the therapies are safe. The Times reporter vows to “profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.”

This irony is that this unhinged conspiratorialism was hatched by someone who was and is actively conspiring to take over the country with members of his secret society. After years in the wilderness, Baehr connected with Leo, who turned on the money spigots. Together, they recruited an “inner core” of FedSoc members “and recruit[ed] them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects.”

Other shadowy billionaires piled in: Home Depot’s trumpy founder Bernie Marcus, Charles Koch, and Betsy DeVos and her family. The new “Teneo 2.0” sought to “to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service.”

Their vision is to create “Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.”

They funnel money to speakers from the absolute depths of the swamp: Erik “Blackwater” Prince, David Brooks, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. New members are assured that their involvement with Teneo is “private and confidential” and the group has kept a low profile — Propublica asked Sheldon Whitehouse — a bitter critic of Leo’s — about the group and got a blank stare.

Teneo’s latest project is to recruit “state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals” to fight ESG policies — all the froth you’ve encountered about the evils of ESG are the result of this secret, coordinated project.

(To be clear, ESG is bullshit, but not because it’s bad for capitalism — ESG is a dumpster fire of greenwashing:)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#profiteers

Teneo organizes donors for members who run for local, state and federal office. Will Scharf, who’s hoping to become Missouri’s next attorney general, has received donations from dozens of Teneo members, giving the maximum allowable donation of $2650.

The paranoid style in American politics never went away. From the Witchfinders General of New England to Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, there has always been a rump of Americans who are very rich and very frightened and who want to put us all in their place.

For these fevered schemers, the Jack Chick tracts that depicted secret Satanic societies seducing innocent kids through Dungeons and Dragons games were hard-hitting documentaries, and as far as they’re concerned, they’re fighting fire with fire.

Image: Jack Chick https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=0046

Tendeo https://www.teneonetwork.com/

Fair use https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[Image ID: A page from the Jack Chick tract 'Dark Dungeons,' depicting a sinister society of robed figures gathered in a circle, welcoming in a new initiate. The pentacle on the floor has been replaced with Teneo's stylized 'T' logo. The dialog has been replaced with text from Teneo's 2019 Community Vision report: 'The Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mother Jones :: No Labels