Defeating Dark Money Deception
Defeating Dark Money Deception
With Donald Trump, what we see is what we get. He’s transparent. He’s blunt and candid. He’s forthright. No one doubts who he is. He’s no puppet for someone behind a curtain. Liberals do not donate to him, and he is not beholden to them.
Not so with many other Republicans. In 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) raised more than $7 million in reelection campaign donations, much of it from out-of-state liberals, while she served on Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee to investigate pro-Trump Republicans involved in the January 6, 2021, rally at the Capitol in D.C. She faces a pro-Trump opponent in her August 16, 2022 primary.
Republican Congressman Rodney Davis from downstate Illinois also raised more of his donations from outside of his state than within. In 2022, he is running against the pro-Trump Rep. Mary Miller for the Republican nomination for the redistricted 15th congressional district, and it seems likely that liberal donations are flowing heavily to Davis as a way of getting back at Trump. Their primary is on June 28.
In many countries, powerful oligarchs control the candidates for public office. The “elected” president or prime minister is merely a puppet for a group of kingmakers who tell the front-man what to and when to do it. He never goes against what the kingmakers tell him, or he will be replaced.
Pro-globalism kingmakers have long run American politics, too. This was explained by Phyllis Schlafly's seminal work, A Choice Not An Echo, which propelled Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 against the otherwise invincible Nelson Rockefeller machine.
Today kingmakers secretly influence through “dark money,” which is political money untraceable to its source. Billionaires such as George Soros and others funnel massive amounts of money into defeating some candidates, and electing others. The public is never told who the billionaires behind the curtain are, where they are sending money, and how much they hate the “America First” Donald Trump.
The public never learns what the hidden agenda of the dark money donors are, or even their identity. The left-leading OpenSecrets.org website arduously traced more than $1 billion funneled from undisclosed sources into politics in the last decade.
Consider CPAC, which is short for the Conservative Political Action Conference that has long had a reputation for being at the vanguard of conservative principles. CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union, which accepted a six-figure donation in 2020 from a liberal group for the purposes of “civil rights, social action, advocacy,” as reported exclusively by The National Pulse.[1]
The liberal group, innocently named the New Venture Fund, has a mission statement focused on “Race, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Commitment,” and it contributed the substantial amount of $183,250 to the ACU. The National Pulse reported that the New Venture Fund underwrites leftist activities, and that its president, Lee Bodner, is a former managing director of Arabella Advisors.
And who is Arabella Advisors? The Atlantic magazine described it as a “Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group” which has targeted former President Donald Trump and officials in his administration officials. Arabella Advisors reportedly funnels more than a billion dollars annually to other liberal groups.
Hayden Ludwig of Capital Research Center was quoted as saying that the Democracy Alliance, a network of donors co-founded by billionaire George Soros, has used the New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund to host at least eight projects that don’t disclose their original funders.” Such is the nature of dark money, virtually none of which is conservative.
Back to the ACU. After receiving this large donation from a dark-money liberal group, in March 2022 its Chairman Matt Schlapp shockingly expressed sympathy for the transgender, biological swimmer Lia Thomas who took top prizes at the NCAA women’s swim championships. Schlapp tweeted that Lia Thomas’s story “deserves our compassion.”
Conservatives were stunned by the ACU Chairman’s comment, until the dark money connection was traced. Other organizations having conservative credentials have also undergone unexplained changes or gyrations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom board abruptly replacing its very successful founder and widely admired president, Alan Sears, in 2017.
Meanwhile dark money has lined up support for a constitutional convention to rewrite our Constitution under Article V. Aptly described as a “horrible idea” by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, millions of dollars in dark money has been pumped into it for a decade such that there are now about two-dozen ostensible conservatives who support it.
Most of the supporters are reliant on organizations that depend on dark money or the media, or are politicians supported by kingmakers. Phyllis Schlafly, who built a grassroots network of activists, was always strongly opposed to holding a new constitutional convention (“Con Con”) that would place our cherished freedom and prosperity at risk.
The Convention of States project does not reveal its big-money donations, but its ideas can be traced back to the Koch brothers who met at least annually with other billionaires to try to leverage their influence. Dominated by globalists, many in that network were anti-Trump in 2016 and continued throughout his administration to oppose his efforts. One of the brothers, David Koch, has passed away but his brother Charles carries on.
They and their network met regularly with Mike Pence and he draws on the oligarchs for future political and financial support. Pence’s conduct against Trump is difficult to understand until one realizes that Pence has been behaving just as the megadonors in the Koch network would want him to. Amid a backlash by many pro-Trump conservatives for how Pence behaved on January 6, 2021, he then landed a top job at the pro-trade-with-China Heritage Foundation in 2021, which has been funded by some of the same megadonors.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott built a massive campaign war chest of more than $60 million after he began attending the secretive Koch meetings. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz have also tapped into the billionaire donors associated with the Koch network, such that Cruz was able to spend $50 million more than Trump did in 2016 on the Republican presidential primaries before Cruz suspended his campaign.
Pence, Abbott, DeSantis and Cruz are all being considered by the billionaire oligarchs as potential opponents of Trump in 2024. Of those, Cruz has been most supportive of Trump, and perhaps this has hurt his support by the billionaire oligarchs who continue to hate Trump.
It is harmful for shadowy oligarchs to be teaming up against the one man who has tried to make America great again: Donald Trump.
As Cruz fought against Trump in 2016, Cruz declared during one of their presidential debates that President Bush should have appointed Michael Luttig to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Luttig turned out to be another Trump-hater. Luttig left the federal appellate court in Richmond for a cushy job as general counsel at the globalist Boeing corporation. Luttig later quit that job as scandal engulfed the company, and after the scandal subsided he reemerged to criticize Trump’s views of the 2020 election.
The Koch brothers made their fortune from oil refineries, and long opposed subsidies for ethanol as favored by Iowa voters. Cruz’s position against ethanol subsidies was unusual by a Republican presidential candidate seeking to win that coveted early primary. It caused an unprecedented backlash against him by the Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad, and lots of head-scratching by political observers. But Cruz could have merely been pushing the agenda of dark-money oligarchs such as the Kochs.
To be sure, Cruz and DeSantis have notched some conservative achievements, and the problem is not them but the secret dark money sources that control Republican candidacies. A Trump endorsement is a far better indicator of the principles of a candidate than fundraising prowess, which has strings attached.
Texas Governor Abbott raised more than $60 million but made pushing Con Con through the Texas legislature a top priority in 2017. Many Republican legislators were on record opposing the Convention of States, but the power of the dark money bullied them into submission, and they voted for it.
In West Virginia in 2022, such dark-money bullying sneaked the Convention of States resolution through both its House and Senate in the same day, without meaningful debate. Other procedural subterfuge has included adding a sunset provision of 5 or so years to induce Missouri legislators to enact the resolution, but then later repealing the sunset provision so that the call for a harmful constitutional convention lasts forever.
Mark Meckler and his wife have made more than a million dollars from the Convention of States project, while other ostensibly conservative supporters of that project appear also to be making big money from other organizations funded by some of the same dark money sources.
Trump is the antidote to the harmful influence of dark money. Self-made and transparent, Trump is beholden to no one behind a curtain. He’s not a mere front-man for secret oligarchs who have their own globalist, anti-American agenda.
Trumpify the GOP in order to strengthen its bond with everyday Americans, and limit the influence of the kingmakers on politics. Phyllis Schlafly advocated this grassroots approach in 1964 with her book A Choice Not An Echo, which we need now as much as ever.
