Moneyball
Why a very suspicious Democrat money machine gets a pass.
The Trump administration is making great strides in its attempts to defund the left and should that survive it may well be will be the administration’s most important legacy. The cultural bias within our institutions has indeed reached critical mass—from education to public broadcasting to USAID to thousands of activist non-profits and NGOs on the dole.1
Despite these efforts, there remains a veritable tsunami of cash sustaining the most radical of politicians. It is funded by cabal of wealthy interests that seeks to use its massive advantage in political fundraising to elect the most reckless of officeholders—by hook or crook.
How is it possible, for example, that in two recent special elections in Red state Florida, the victorious Republican candidates were outspent by totals approaching 10-1?2 That’s not an outlier. Democrats have been out-raising Republicans for years, including the last election cycle when a soon-to-be vanquished Kamala Harris hauled in more than $1 billion.3
Unless Democrats truly are the party of the rich, one would think that fundraising totals would reflect a center-right electorate.4 Alas, they do not. It’s true that conservative donors often fail to show up, but something else stinks starting with the online Democrat cash machine known as ActBlue.
Trump has issued a memo directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to start an investigation into “illegal ‘straw donor’ and foreign contributions in American elections, following reports and congressional investigations regarding potentially unlawful activities through ActBlue and other online fundraising platforms.”5
It’s about time. A House investigation apparently found numerous and “significant fraud campaigns” on ActBlue of which almost half had a foreign nexus.6 This is likely the tip of the proverbial iceberg, though to be sure money in politics is certainly nothing new.
President John F. Kennedy once recounted how foreign interests, even allies, tried to control him, “I had the damnedest meeting in New York last night,” he said to a friend. “I went to this party. It was given by a group of people who were big money contributors, and also Zionists and they said to me, ‘We know that your campaign is in terrible financial shape’…the deal they offered me was that they would finance the rest of this campaign if I would agree to let them run Middle Eastern policy of the United States for the next four years.”7