Friday, March 25, 2022

Anyone's Guess.

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It is evident to me, and should be to others, attacks by Democrats on adversaries are simply cover for their doing that which they accuse others. Time and again, Democrats charge Republicans of this or that only to learn, upon investigation, Democrats are guilty of their own accusations.

Time and again, Trump and his associates were charged with spying and/or collusion only to learn it was  Hillary working  through a law firm which was in the pocket of the Democrat Party was performing these nefarious activities.

It's  a neat trick and when your friends in the mass media are ready to support or deny anything Democrats allege. It is little wonder fake news controls the destiny of our republic.

The august NYT's recently admitted they were involved in skullduggery if one  plowed through some 20 pages of the Grey Lady fish wrapper.

For decades, Democrats have been building constituent voting groups and protecting their accomplishments by false reporting such as claiming voter identification requirements were a Republican ploy to restrict black voting. Stacey Abrams has become the black Joan of Ark proponent of this canard.

In Kim Strassel's attached op ed she  blows a hole in Democrat claims that Republicans are the true "dark money" crowd when , in fact, it is a Rhode Island Democrat, named Sheldon Whitehouse, who has "green egg" all over his face

There is little difference between Russia's KGB disinformation efforts and those employed by the Democrat Party. Trump and Covid became the two critical  enablers  allowing the radical progressive wing of the Democrat Party to surface after decades of sub-terrain planning. 

Attacks on children by the CRT crowd, rioting  supported by the BLM crowd, Soros' funding of radical district attorney candidates  and earlier attacks on Wall Street Capitalism have been in the works for decades.

Now it is out in the open and we  have an administration heavily influenced, if not totally controlled  by, these radical elements. 

The future of America is being determined. The outcome is anyone's guess.

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Ketanji Brown Jackson and ‘Dark Money’

The Supreme Court nominee’s hearings expose the hypocrisy of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s crusade against it.

By Kimberley A. Strassel 

Background of this week’s nomination hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, one could hear a welcome noise: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s glass house shattering.

The Rhode Island Democrat has spent a decade hucking boulders at his favorite bogeyman, “dark money.” When not threatening judges, Mr. Whitehouse papers the Capitol with reports that claim to expose the shady links between covert right-wing “front groups” funded with dirty “multimillion-dollar checks” and secretly giving orders to conservative Supreme Court justices. Mr. Whitehouse hasn’t yet accused the Federalist Society of inventing dark money in a Wuhan lab—but give him time.

So with no small delight, Republicans spent the week highlighting the extent to which Judge Jackson’s nomination was driven by covert left-wing front groups funded by much bigger checks with the aim of influencing the high court. The reason Mr. Whitehouse is such an expert on “dark money” is that his side has used it longer, and does so far bigger and better. With the Jackson nomination exposing this truth, maybe Washington can finally have a more honest debate about what’s really at stake: free speech.

The term “dark money” came into existence only 12 years ago, when the left-leaning Sunlight Foundation used it in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Both sides had long had nonprofits, and both had long understood the importance of applying First Amendment protections to donors. Yet the left resented that Citizens United opened a path for a growing conservative nonprofit movement to compete more directly in the political arena. President Obama launched a campaign against “shadowy” right-wing groups and donors, inspiring the Internal Revenue Service’s scandalous targeting and intimidation of conservative nonprofits.

The slurs against conservatives deflected from the left’s own “dark money” operation—which dwarfs anything on the right, including in Supreme Court fights. The left pioneered this activism in 1987, when a “dark money” outfit known as People for the American Way spent $1.5 million on attack ads against Robert Bork.

The left’s new high-court power player is Demand Justice, whose mark on the Jackson nomination is anything but secret. Demand Justice spearheaded campaigns against Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, including vicious attacks on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It issued “grades” of Senate Democrats, rating their efforts to halt Trump appointments, and is a leading advocate of court-packing. It led the pressure campaign on Justice Stephen Breyer to retire, even hiring a billboard truck reading “Breyer, retire” to circle the Supreme Court.

Demand Justice in 2019 issued a “shortlist” of acceptable liberal picks to the Supreme Court, and this month it invested $1 million in an ad campaign for Judge Jackson. Not that Demand Justice needed ads to exercise sway. White House press secretary Jen Psaki is a former communications consultant to the group. Senior White House counsel Paige Herwig —assigned to shepherd the Biden pick—was deputy counsel at Demand Justice. And the group’s executive director, Brian Fallon, is a former communications director for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Demand Justice was a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which the Atlantic calls the “indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.” Mr. Whitehouse loves to accuse the Federalist Society of collecting $400 million in “dark” donations over four years. The Sixteen Thirty Fund doled out $410 million in “dark” funding in 2020 alone.

The fund was itself seeded by an array of dark-money outfits; operates alongside a dark-money sister nonprofit (New Venture Fund) that makes grants to dark-money left-wing causes; and is managed by Arabella Advisers, which oversees a network of dark-money liberal nonprofits. Mr. Whitehouse would need the rest of his life to untangle this web if he honestly cared about revealing dark money.

He doesn’t, as this week amusingly exposed. The senator furiously tried and failed to revert attention back to “right wing” dollars, at one point contorting himself into a defense of liberal dark money. The Jackson hearings made clear the only thing Mr. Whitehouse and his media partisans care about is winning. Their goal is to muzzle the right, using “disclosure” to unleash liberal mobs that will intimidate conservative donors into submission. Barring new disclosure rules (which liberal nonprofits oppose), he’ll use the dark-money issue to paint opponents as sneaky and corrupt. That gets harder now, even as the media spent the week portraying GOP senators as hypocrites.

Republicans would have been smarter this week to have done more than just point out the “dark money” reality. This was a chance to stand up for free speech. Both sides exercised it during the Trump nominations; both sides are exercising it now. It can be ugly, but it is fundamental to American political debate, and neither side has a monopoly. Or at least not so long as Mr. Whitehouse fails to sell his partisan “dark money” agenda.

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