Mark Zuckerberg – Strategic Culture Foundation

How Mark Zuckerberg’s Millions and the Center for Technology and Civic Life Turned Wisconsin Blue in 2020

A A — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 20:24:39 +0000

How Mark Zuckerberg’s millions and the Center for Technology and Civic Life turned Wisconsin blue in 2020.

By William DOYLE

Democrats seem to know that they cannot win a national election without employing the same tactics that they used to win in 2020. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, said “If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed.”

What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Our research shows that CTCL spending in Wisconsin generated enough votes for Joe Biden to secure him an Electoral College win there in 2020. We estimate that CTCL spending in Wisconsin purchased Joe Biden an additional 65,222votes,without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.

Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as non-partisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research shows that the $419.5 million of CTCL and CEIR spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution, and highly partisan in its effects. Targeted CTCL and CEIR spending played a decisive role in building a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic votes over Republican votes.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. Rather, it had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, concierge-level get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.

The injection of bias into select local election offices through CTCL infiltration introduced structural bias into Wisconsin’s entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others, and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voters and voting methods an outsized impact on the final election results. The outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin is not the outcome that would have occurred if the election had been conducted on the basis of established election laws, equal treatment of voters, and administrative neutrality.

CTCL In Wisconsin: Ground Zero For CTCL’s Nationwide Effort

CTCL’s Safe Elections Project in Wisconsin was not the result of a grass roots clamor for greater election funding among money-starved municipalities desperately seeking additional election funding. It was entirely a top-down endeavor, initiated by CTCL operatives, and funded by a massive inflow of money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who cultivated connections among “Wisconsin Five” mayors and other city officials, incentivized the first grant applications, and provided funds and advice to aid in their completion.

CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election began in Racine. In late May, CTCL issued a $100,000 grant to the southeast Wisconsin city to “recruit other Wisconsin cities to join the ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan.’” Racine Mayor Cory Mason spoke to his fellow liberal mayors in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Kenosha about accepting CTCL’s grants—with the proviso that there would be strings attached.
CTCL authorized the City of Racine to distribute from its initial $100,000 grant, $10,000 to each of the four recruited cities (keeping $10,000 for itself), as an incentive for them to participate with Racine in applying for the larger CTCL conditional grants.

Emails obtained through public records requests show Mason’s office in May 2020 setting up numerous virtual meetings with the four other mayors three months before CTCL publicly announced the first round of grants to the “Wisconsin 5” on July 7, 2020. The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, and CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election was the culmination of a collaborative effort between CTCL’s activist directors and election officials in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. These cities would soon come to be referred to in CTCL inner circles as “The Wisconsin 5.”

At least 10 other cities in areas that were important to Democratic efforts to retake Wisconsin would eventually seek to become part of the plan by applying for and accepting significant CTCL grants considerably in excess of the minimum $5,000 offered to non-urban election offices throughout the state.

CTCL And “The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan” to Infiltrate Wisconsin’s Election System

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan—which would emerge out of a collaboration between high level CTCL Advisors, several representatives of the Pierre Omidyar funded National Vote at Home Institute, and Milwaukee’s City Clerk office during Summer, 2020—was the lynchpin of CTCL’s involvement in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Fulfilling its major objectives was a condition for CTCL funding. City officials among The Wisconsin 5 signed off on “clawback provisions” that allowed CTCL to reclaim their grant money if it was not used to further the objectives contained in the plan.

For example, the CTCL contract that Green Bay approved warns that the grant was to be used “only for” safe and secure election administration, “and for no other purposes,” which means under the ambitious terms they set forth in their portion of the WSVP. The grant’s clawback provision stated that “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met or (b) it must do so to comply with applicable laws or regulations.”

How The Wisconsin 5 Sought to Implement CTCL’s Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan: Bonfire of the Inanities

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan lists CTCL’s four major strategic objectives.

First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes
Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

CTCL funded election offices in Wisconsin seemed particularly intent on courting a demographic favored by the activists at CTCL—a loosely defined “New American Majority” coalition—to replace the working-class voters who had abandoned the party in droves in 2016, and who formerly made up a significant part of the old Democratic “Blue Wall” in the industrial upper Midwest.

This coalition encompasses people of color, single women, young people, and is often extended to include members of the LGBTQ community. Two of the non-profits most closely affiliated with CTCL, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, are at the forefront of proponents of this electoral strategy. According to Democracy Docket, “In the 2020 election, VPC and CVI overcame unprecedented challenges to help engage voters from the New American Majority.”

Addressing these challenges would involve a large commitment of financial and human resources in Wisconsin. There was therefore considerable anguish expressed in the Wisconsin Safe Voting plan about the “hand holding” level of assistance that such voters required in order to cast valid votes, even under greatly relaxed absentee ballot standards during Covid-19 afflicted 2020. To meet this need, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine together budgeted over $540 thousand of their CTCL grant money toward various forms of “non-partisan voter education” alone.

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan outlined the prodigious efforts that the Wisconsin Five were willing to make in order to bend the election system from within toward these untapped tranches of low-propensity potential Democratic voters, and thereby increase Democratic votes in their cities, and in the statewide totals. Established by officials of the Wisconsin Five in collaboration with CTCL advisors, it would serve as the general template for CTCL’s efforts in other key swing states nationwide. It is an extravagant wish list of far-left Democratic election concerns and priorities.
Some of the highlights:

Concern was expressed about “voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.”
Concerns were also expressed that many targeted Democratic voters would have no idea how to cast absentee ballots. WSVP participants lamented the fact that “countless voters” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID “took considerable staff time and resources.”
Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “Voter Navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.
Racine wished to create a small corps of “Voter Ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would use their grants to recruit, train and employ paid Voter Ambassadors who would set up at the City’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests, including photo ID compliance.
Green Bay allocated funds to install secure drop boxes at the city’s libraries, police community buildings, and potentially several other sites including major grocery stores, gas stations, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and Northern Wisconsin Technical College, in addition to the one already in use at their City Hall.
In Madison city officials planned to install one secure drop box for every 15,000 voters, or 12 drop boxes total. Madison also planned to provide a potential absentee ballot witness at each drop box, utilizing social distancing and equipped with PPE.
City officials from all of The Wisconsin Five sought additional funds “to accommodate those who [either do not] want to vote by mail, or go to the polls on election day or to early vote.” Funds were therefore sought to enable absentee “curbside” and “drive-thru voting,” particularly for those with health concerns who could “remain in their cars and have a virtually contact-less voting process.” Each of the five cities asked for significant resources to expand drive-through “curbside” voting for four weeks prior to election day.
Madison officials sought $160,000 to provide 18 in-person absentee voting locations for the four weeks leading up to the November election. Madison officials also proposed the use of carts for their ExpressVote ballot marking devices for curbside voting so that the use of ExpressVote could be “normalized” to help voters with disabilities feel “less segregated” during the voting process.
Green Bay sought to motivate potential voters through a CTCL-funded multi-prong strategy utilizing “every door direct mail,” targeted mail, geo-fencing, billboards, radio, television, and streaming-service PSAs, digital advertising, and automated calls and texts. The City guaranteed that these efforts would be undertaken in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali. Additional grant funds to fund voter outreach from within Green Bay’s election office would be “distributed in partnership with key community organizations including churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans.” The total amount that Green Bay sought for this initiative alone was $215,000, or about 64 percent of their entire pre-CTCL election budget.
Milwaukee wanted to develop a broad-based voter outreach strategy that would appeal “to a variety of communities within Milwaukee, including historically underrepresented communities such as LatinX and African Americans, and would include a specific focus on the re-enfranchisement of voters who are no longer on probation or parole for a felony. Additionally, this campaign would include an edgy but nonpartisan and tasteful communications campaign to harness the current [Black Lives Matter] protests’ emphasis on inequity and ties that message to voting.”
Racine expressed the desire to obtain funds to purchase “a Mobile Voting Precinct so the City can travel around the City to community centers and strategically chosen partner locations and enable people to vote in this accessible (ADA-compliant), secure, and completely portable polling booth on wheels, an investment that the City [would] be able to use for years to come.”
Madison planned to launch “a robust and strategic poll worker recruitment effort, focusing on people of color, high school students, and college students” to replace older, experienced poll workers.
Milwaukee promoted a similar plan to increase staffing by launching a recruitment campaign aimed at “a new generation of election workers to sign up and be involved in their democracy.”

Absentee Ballot Chaos Heavily Favors Joe Biden in 2020

CTCL won Wisconsin for Joe Biden, and they did it mainly with absentee ballots. Covid-19 was used as a pretext in many states to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, guidelines and ballot verification procedures that have been long standing and time tested. The result was chaos, especially in states that suddenly moved from very limited absentee voting toward near universal mail-in voting in a very short period of time, such as Wisconsin.

CTCL’s major objective, as set forth in all their internal documents and grant applications, was to promote absentee voting. This involved getting absentee ballots into the hands of reliably Democratic demographics, showing them how to complete them correctly, convincing them to submit them, and providing as many avenues as possible for those ballots to be returned and counted.

CTCL’s involvement in the 2020 election appears exceedingly complex on the surface, at times requiring a program to keep track of the major players, scandals, and institutional relationships that grew out of the CTCL Safe Elections Project. This aspect of CTCL involvement in Wisconsin has been extensively documented by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Spotlight, among others.

But all of the resources devoted toward ballot curing, drop boxes, vote navigators, partisan activists infiltrating local election offices, and other voter outreach efforts funded by CTCL were aimed at one ultimate end: Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.
While Democrats knew that the radical move toward near universal absentee balloting in Wisconsin and the chaos that would ensue would probably work in their favor, they could not be sure. This is where CTCL performed an invaluable function that could not have been performed from outside the election system, and why infiltration and the injection of large amounts of funding into local election offices was of such importance.

As Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center, an expert on mail-in voting, told us:

The surge of mail-in ballots due to Covid-19 was one of the 2020 election’s greatest novelties and the key to how the election was manipulated in favor of Joe Biden.

Democratic leadership came together behind vote-by-mail in early 2020 as their best shot at overcoming voters’ Covid fears and defeating Trump, in large part because of pressure from election activist groups, such as the National Vote At Home Institute.

The resulting tsunami of mail-in ballots created unprecedented security and chain-of-custody problems in states where vote-by-mail has never been tried on this scale. It strained the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots both to voters and vote-counters on-time.

It also stressed the budgets of local elections offices, requiring additional personnel and ballot-counting machines even as Covid-19 restricted working conditions. Without a surefire way to get these mail-in ballots first into voters’ hands, and second into ballot-counters’ hands, the Left could not have been confident the outcome would have significantly helped Biden. This is where CTCL proved essential.

A large part of CTCL’s grants paid for private ballot collection bins outside of USPS’s jurisdiction and with questionable oversight. CTCL also funded additional poll workers and vote-by-mail equipment to count incoming ballots, favoring large, Democratic-leaning cities in battleground states.

How CTCL’s Promotion of Mail-In Voting Favored Democrats in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, absentee ballots can be submitted by mail or “in person.” The majority of absentee ballots in Wisconsin were submitted via mail or deposited in private drop boxes whose contents were then harvested and delivered to the City Clerk. The Wisconsin 5 ended up having the highest rates of mail in voting in the state. All were well above the statewide average of 59.8 percent, with the highest being Dane County (Madison) at 74.4 percent and Milwaukee County at 70.6 percent. This was a major contributor toward increases in Democratic votes among Wisconsin’s CTCL funded counties.

By September 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) had already approved a proposal to fund the mailing of all registered voters absentee ballot request forms, and then assisted further increases in mail-in voting by refusing to intervene in a campaign to convince voters to prevaricate about their absentee ballot status to avoid ID and signature matching requirements.

This campaign veers toward actual election fraud. Clerks in liberal bastions Dane and Milwaukee counties in March 2020 advised voters that anyone could use the threat of Covid-19 as a reason for claiming “indefinitely confined” status for absentee voting, which excuses them from voter ID requirements. This message reached hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters, and spread beyond Dane and Milwaukee counties. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that, while this advice may have been ill advised, it was ultimately up to each voter to determine their status. Ultimately, about 215,000 voters claimed this status, four times more voters than had claimed to be “indefinitely confined” in 2016.

Absentee voting by mail has a well-known partisan bias that favors Democrats. According to the Election Lab at MIT, the partisan differences in voting by mail increased substantially in 2020. The number of Democrats voting by mail increased by more than 200 percent, while the number of Republicans utilizing vote by mail increased by only 50 percent compared to 2016. In total, they estimate that nearly 60 percent Democrats cast their ballots by mail in 2020, compared to just 30 percent for Republicans. Mail-in ballots are therefore twice as likely to be cast by Democratic voters as Republican voters.

This is well known, and is one of the reasons that Democrats advocate so strongly for universal mail-in voting, but it is far more than a matter of tailoring voting practices to their voters’ preferences. What they fear is that a significant portion of their coalition will not vote at all without mail-in ballots.

Table 1 shows the breakdown of absentee voting among the Wisconsin 5 counties and the other five counties that received significant CTCL grant money.

Prior to 2020, the rate of absentee voting in Wisconsin was 4.6 percent on average in 2016, and 5.5 percent in 2018. Wisconsin had no experience with widespread absentee voting in 2020 when the statewide absentee voting rate suddenly soared to 58.9 percent.
The vast majority of votes in the top 10 CTCL counties were absentee votes in 2020. Among the Wisconsin 5 counties, 70.6 percent of all ballots were absentee ballots.
For the top 10 CTCL counties, the average rate of absentee voting was 67.5 percent, considerably above the state average of 59.8 percent.
There is strong correlation between high absentee voting rates and counties that generated the most excess votes for Joe Biden compared to 2016, which is the hallmark of a successful get-out-the-vote effort.
Biden’s vote margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties, which each had absentee voting rates above 70 percent, was a staggering 267,652 votes, over 25 times his statewide margin of victory.
Four out of the five counties that experienced the largest Democratic shift in 2020 were the four counties with the highest absentee voting rates.

Financing Wisconsin’s Shadow Election System: The Myth of Underfunded Local Election Offices

While we cannot attest to the particular strains on election budgets caused by Covid-19, we do know that by July 2020 the federal government had already distributed over $470 million in CARES Act election grants. The state of Wisconsin received $7,362,345 from the Federal Government and provided state matching funds of $1,472,469 for a total of $8,834,814 to deal with Covid related election expenses.Due to Wisconsin election law, CTCL grants were actually made to cities and not to counties, as in many other states. CTCL marketed its Safe Election Project as an attempt to address the needs of underfunded local election offices in the face of Covid-19 related election challenges. CTCL characterized the problem as “A chronic pattern of systemic underfunding of elections – made more acute by a pandemic.”

To give some idea of the scale of CTCL funding of Wisconsin’s election, this is almost exactly equal to the $8.8 million that CTCL ultimately provided to the Wisconsin Five alone, even though those cities contain less than 20 percent of the state’s population. If they were “underfunded” before CTCL appeared, they were certainly not underfunded afterward by any statewide standard.

But an examination of the election budgets published by the state’s most populous cities shows that The Wisconsin 5 already had some of the most generous election funding in the state. After accounting for CTCL grants, an obvious two tier election system – at least in financial terms – emerges in Wisconsin between the Wisconsin 5 plus 1 (the additional city being Janesville in Rock County) and the rest of Wisconsin cities.

Average per capita election budgets among the six largest CTCL grant recipients was $5.61. Among the next 5 largest Wisconsin cities it was $2.64 per capita. CTCL singled out for its largest grants some of the most well funded election offices in the state.
After accounting for CTCL grants, average per capita funds available for election spending rose to $15.48 among the Wisconsin 5 while among the next 5 most populous Wisconsin cities, after accounting for their much smaller CTCL grants, average per capita election funding was only about $3.63.
Not only was CTCL funding not based on any objective criteria of “underfunding” at the state level, but CTCL grants greatly exacerbated existing election funding disparities significantly, even between high grant CTCL cities, and low grant or no grant CTCL cities.
Approximately 25 percent to 35 percent of Wisconsin’s population benefited considerably from CTCL funding, while the remainder of the state’s population would have to make do with their existing budgets, supplemented perhaps by one of CTCL’s nominal $5,000 grants.

Partisan Bias in The Distribution of CTCL Grants: Why It Matters

In Wisconsin, CTCL grants were awarded to cities and towns, which are in charge of administering elections. Partisan bias in the distribution of CTCL money is important not only because it is unfair, but because it introduces an easily quantifiable structural bias that favors Democrats in the election system in places that are already more inclined to generate more Democratic votes than Republican votes.
Table 3 shows that big CTCL money went to some of the most heavily Democratic cities in the U.S.

The Wisconsin Institute For Law and Liberty estimates that 216 communities in Wisconsin got CTCL grants totalling about $10.3 million.
$8.8 million, or 85 percent, went to The Wisconsin 5, all heavily Democratic cities.
$9.2 million, or about 90 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to the top 15 cities which are distributed among 11 out of 72 of Wisconsin’s counties.
The top 9 CTCL grants all went to heavily Democratic cities. 80 percent of CTCL’s large grants, which amounted to 90 percent of all CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to reliably Democratic cities.
CTCL has repeatedly claimed that the distribution of their grants shows no partisan bias. This is because in Wisconsin, over 200 of their small $5,000 grants, which appear to have been handed out indiscriminately, accounted for only 10 percent of their statewide funding. The distribution of CTCL grant funding, on the other hand, shows considerable and systematic partisan bias.
Between Dane (Madison) and Milwaukee Counties Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 364,372 votes in a state that Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. Taking into account grants to Fitchburg and Sun Prairie in Dane County, and West Allis in Milwaukee County, the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state got $4.79 million in CTCL grants, or 46.5 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin while they make up only 25.6 percent of the state’s population..
About 85 percent of CTCL’s Wisconsin grants went to the Wisconsin Five cities, whose average partisan bias is D+37 percent.
87 percent of cities that got substantial CTCL grants became more heavily Democratic. Even Republican majority cities like Wausau, Waukesha and Brookfield (in Waukesha County) became less Republican in 2020. This is not because of voters switching sides. Donald Trump increased his vote totals throughout these counties over 2016 by over 12 percent. It is because Democrat votes in CTCL cities increased by a larger amount than Republican votes increased.
By targeting such heavily Democratic cities, even in Republican counties like Brown, Kenosha and Racine, CTCL money could be relied upon to generate the maximum possible vote gains for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Even in CTCL cities where Donald Trump won, he won by fewer votes than he did in 2016 as a result of a greater percentage increase in Biden votes, which is all that matters for statewide vote totals.
The GOTV multiplier we estimate for these cities shows how a randomly targeted get-out-the-vote effort will affect their net additional Democratic votes. For example, in Madison an additional 1000 votes is expected to generate a net gain for Democrats of 670 votes. In Kenosha, it would be 160 votes.

The Impact of CTCL on Wisconsin’s Election, 2020

Joe Biden won only 14 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In the ten counties Biden won that did not receive substantial CTCL money, the sum of his victory margin was only about 19,600 votes.

In the remaining 4 counties in which Biden won, all of which were CTCL counties, his margin was 380,371 votes. Biden’s margin of victory came almost entirely from CTCL funded counties, so that is where we look to attempt to discover the impact of CTCL funding on Wisconsin’s 2020 election results.
Many counties received more than one CTCL grant that add up to a substantial total, so we include countywide grant totals in our analysis. Our conclusions are based on a binary in group/out group analysis, where the in group consists of counties that were awarded over $50k in CTCL funds. These counties when combined exhibit different statistical characteristics than Wisconsin’s other 62 counties when we focus on CTCL spending as a determining variable. We conceptualize elections in CTCL counties as “Get Out the Vote” machines for Joe Biden based on our GOTV multiplier in Table 3, where a randomly targeted get out vote effort will generate net gains in votes for Joe Biden based on the D+ percentage. Since the get-out-the-vote effort in CTCL counties was not randomly targeted, this methodology gives very conservative estimates.

Using this method, and adjusting for systematic increases in turnout and population growth, we estimate with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL spending in Wisconsin caused: 65,222 Additional Joe Biden votes. Since Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was 20,682 votes, we conclude with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that in the absence of CTCL in Wisconsin: Donald Trump wins Wisconsin by 44,540 votes.

This estimate is closely aligned with our undisputed Texas results, where we were able to employ a more sophisticated methodology because of the greater number of counties that received CTCL grants, and higher and more continuous variability in grant amounts. In the Texas case, using BART analysis, we estimated that additional Biden votes that could be attributed to CTCL was about 200,000 votes, or 3.8 percent of his statewide total. In this case our estimate is 4 percent of Biden’s Wisconsin statewide total, so these results are closely aligned with our Texas results.

CTCL spending had other effects, in addition to increasing Biden’s vote total. With the exception of Fond Du Lac County, all of the counties which comprise our CTCL in-group shifted significantly toward Democrats in 2020, despite the fact that all witnessed significant increases in Donald Trump votes over 2016, usually in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 12 percent. This was not a systematic pattern that we observed in Wisconsin’s other 62 counties, in which Republican to Democratic shifts are far fewer and more randomly distributed.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s reliably red and third most populous county, shifted Democrat by an astonishing 5.85 percent in 2020, while solidly red Marathon County also shifted Democrat. Though they remained Republican counties, they are much less so now.

Extremely blue Dane County became even more blue, with the Democrat vote share increasing by an equally stunning 5.28 percent from an already high level. Unless this is reversed, one of the most significant effects of CTCL’s intervention in Wisconsin was to make its most populous counties significantly more Democratic than they were in 2016. These changes could have a decisive impact on elections in 2022 and 2024, especially if an organization like CTCL attempts to replicate their 2020 effort in the future.

We can assert with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL’s $10.3 million investment in Wisconsin flipped the state from red to blue in 2020. A bill to prevent private funding of Wisconsin’s elections in the future recently passed both houses of the Wisconsin legislature but was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. We doubt he will reconsider his veto after reviewing this report.

theamericanconservative.com

Mark Zuckerberg, Venture-Capital Radical

A A — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:00:43 +0000

The Facebook founder’s unusual LLC philanthropy allows him to blur the lines between business, charity, and politics.

by Michael VOLPE

Imagine an organization that lobbies for progressive laws while providing venture-capital funding to techno-futurist endeavors. It gives to numerous charitable causes in its own region—funding homeless shelters, Boys & Girls Clubs, and other community organizations—while also participating in political advocacy and influence at the state and national levels. It spends a fortune every year on cutting-edge innovations in science and technology while funding a grade school designed to produce the next generation of left-wing activists. It leverages billions of dollars in assets for social change, all without the limits and transparency required of a traditional, nonprofit philanthropic organization.

The person behind such a project would have to be exceptionally creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative. He is—and his name is Mark Zuckerberg.

The world knows Zuckerberg for Facebook, but I’m talking about another venture altogether: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), co-founded in 2015 with his wife, Priscilla Chan. Like the enigmatic Emerson Collective run by Silicon Valley fellow traveler Laurene Powell Jobs, CZI is ostensibly a philanthropic endeavor, but it’s structured as a limited liability corporation (LLC), rather than a standard 501(c)3 nonprofit.

CZI does have several affiliate and subsidiary organizations, though, some of which are 501(c)3s. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation, for instance, is a traditional grantmaking non-profit with $4,650,890,520 in assets according to its most recent financial statement. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Advocacy Fund is another affiliated non profit with $101,062,685.

While not a direct subsidiary, another CZI partner organization is FWD.us, a site which bills itself as backing bipartisan immigration reform. Zuckerberg started the site in 2013 along with other tech giants including Bill Gates; Drew Houston, co-founder of DropBox; and Sean Parker, who created Napster and was in early on Facebook (he was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network).

FWD.us claims to look for bipartisan solutions, stating on its website, “A majority of Americans support immigration and criminal justice reform, and we’re working with legislators and groups on both sides of the aisle to drive real change at the local, state, and federal levels.” But a statement issued shortly after the election suggests that “bipartisan” is really code for “liberal” here:

We want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their historic victory and celebrate the opportunity for progress it provides our nation.

As we saw with years of public backlash throughout President Trump’s entire term, voters from all walks of life repudiated Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, demagoguery, and xenophobia. President Trump made his assault on the immigration system and immigrant families a signature issue for his presidency, and the public voted him out.

Tech titans, of course, are not merely interested observers on the immigration issue. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has benefited greatly from H1-B visas, which allow them to hire IT and other tech specialists from other countries, especially India and China. These foreign workers tend to work for less than their American equivalents, and there are longstanding complaints that the tech industry has abused the visa program.

Trump shut down H1-B Visas earlier this year, while Biden has shown himself much more Big Tech-friendly on this issue. As noted by immigration resource Path2USA:

Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in the US Presidential elections will be a victory for US immigration as well. Promising a comprehensive immigration reform, Joe Biden not only intends to increase the H1-B visa quota but also resume work permits for spouses of H1-B visa holders.

With an intention to reverse many of the restrictive immigration policies imposed by the outgoing Trump administration, Joe Biden is being hailed as the President that will bring fairness to skilled foreign workers that will support and improve the U.S. economy equally.

When it’s not pushing policies that coincidentally cut Silicon Valley’s costs, CZI directs many of its resources toward impact investing—one of the left’s preferred methods of social change, in which venture capital is directed specifically to startups expected to advance progressive goals.

One of its flagship projects is the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which supports forward-thinking medical research and technology. In the group’s own words: “At the Biohub, we actively nurture and create opportunities for leaders in science and technology to come together and drive discovery, setting the standard for collaborative science.”

Biohub projects include some mind-blowing research like the Cell Atlas initiative:

The Cell Atlas will be made available to researchers around the world, shedding light on the many different types of cells that control the body’s major organs, including the brain, heart and lungs.

This type of resource has never been created. Much of the technology necessary to complete the Cell Atlas was only developed recently. These new tools will be deployed at CZ Biohub and other participating institutions to map the cells of the human body in unprecedented detail.

CZI funds bio-imaging technology and open-source science research software in its portfolio as well.

Outside of the medical realm, CZI has devoted substantial capital to education technology. Some of the beneficiaries have been remarkably successful, such as Age of Learning, which created ABCmouse, a popular educational website for kids two to eight. Brightwheel, another recipient of CZI ventral capital, creates apps for early childhood education. Another, Eruditus, runs high-budget courses for corporate executives. CZI also recently devoted $6.3 million to “equity in education.”

Elsewhere, CZI’s educational ventures are overtly political. The Chang Zuckerberg Initiative is a key backer of PilotEd, a school initiative that utilizes a highly unorthodox, unabashedly progressive curriculum. PilotEd currently operates one school in Indianapolis, and is working on opening its second in Las Vegas.

A feature on CZI’s website boasts of PilotEd’s unconventional methods:

For students at pilotED, issues of identity are worked directly into the curriculum along with social-emotional learning. For example, a history lesson about Plymouth Rock includes the traditional story of the gathering of Pilgrims and indigenous people. But it also includes what is left out of traditional history books. Teachers talk with students about who they identify with in the story. Do they see themselves as someone who is persecuted for their beliefs or as someone who experiences genocide? The lesson would wrap up with a discussion on emotions and questions such as “What would it feel like if that was your family, or if it was your friend?”

The same feature opens with a glowing report on seven-year-old PilotEd elementary students being inserted into racial protests in Indianapolis this summer.

But even the intensely woke PilotEd is far from the LLC’s most explicit bit of politicking. In 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dove headfirst into two key ballot initiatives in its home state of California. Here is more from their website:

Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), announced additional funding for two 2020 California ballot measure committees. This includes an additional $4.5 million in support of Proposition 15, which would restore an estimated $12 billion annually in much-needed local revenue to California communities by closing commercial property tax loopholes; and $1 million to the No on Proposition 20 campaign to oppose a measure that would incarcerate more people for low-level crimes and increase already bloated prison budgets.

The criminal justice reform also strikes a bipartisan tone on paper. CZI claims, “The justice system’s emphasis on punishment over rehabilitation profoundly impacts our communities. We’re focused on finding new ways forward by safely reducing incarceration, providing fair chances for those impacted, and lifting up the voices of people closest to the problem.”

One CZI-supported criminal justice program is Fair and Just Prosecution, which brings new prosecutors together to “talk about best practices”—effectively a brainstorm group for prosecutors. It’s an interesting program to consider in light of the coordinated campaign by left-wing mega-donors to fill prosecutors’ offices with progressives.

The CZI-opposed Prop. 20 was rejected handily in California’s November election. CZI’s favored Prop. 15, though—heavily unpopular from the start—was also rejected, by a much narrower margin. But this is not necessarily indicative of CZI’s potential to effect change.

It’s now the stuff of business legend that Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, was the original investor in Facebook. When Zuckerberg arrived in Palo Alto in 2004, he had a website with exponential growth in accounts but no revenue, let alone profits. A few short months later, Thiel famously invested the first $500,000 and several other rounds of venture capital followed. In May 2012, Facebook went public. Thiel sold off the majority of his stock that same year, with his half-million dollars netting nearly $1 billion. Zuckerberg has since created Facebook Live, bought WhatsApp and Instagram, and is now investing in virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Facebook is currently valued at around $800 billion.

Less well known, though probably more important, is that Thiel passed on several rounds of further financing, believing at the time Facebook was overvalued based on the money raised. He would later call these moves his biggest professional mistake, saying that he underestimated Facebook’s potential for exponential growth. In effect, Thiel underestimated Zuckerberg.

With CZI now likewise in its early years, nobody should make the same mistake again.

theamericanconservative.com

George Soros’s Hypocrisy About Facebook and Much Else

A A — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 12:46:28 +0000

The investor George Soros objects that Facebook is doing what the U.S. Government allows it to do, but he doesn’t object to the U.S. Government’s allowing it. Yet, he claims to be opposing the Republican Government of Donald Trump, while he demands that the leadership of Facebook be replaced — supposedly for violating a law that the Trump Administration maybe isn’t enforcing. Is Soros really that incoherent? Or is there an ulterior motive here?

He headlined an op-ed in the January 31st New York Times, “Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be in Control of Facebook”, and he closed there by saying, “I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. They follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.”

He cited, for blame in this, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows passive online media — media that exercise no editorial control over what their users post online — to be not responsible for, and not subject to lawsuits for, whatever is posted to their sites.* Soros noted that Facebook is not censoring posts to its site in a way that will help Democratic candidates, but instead in a way that will help Republican candidates. He apparently wants censorship, but it must be his type of censorship, not theirs. He is clear about his support for some sort of censorship. But is he proposing that the Government will somehow force this change from a Republican Facebook to a Democratic Facebook, or instead that Facebook’s stockholders will, somehow, do this — get rid of their founder and two top leaders? Soros doesn’t respect his readers enough to so much as even just touch on that basic question in his presentation — is the Government to get rid of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, or are the stockholders supposed to do it? Soros is addressing his commentary only to fools who don’t care about what case he’s trying to persuade them to believe. If his article were, at all, serious, it would have been less holier-than-thou against businesses that supposedly adhere to “only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences,” and it would have outlined a proposal — and not just asserted “One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.” But why shouldn’t they? He really doesn’t say. He doesn’t cite even a single concrete example. He presents no case, at all.

He didn’t object that by Facebook’s doing any censorship at all, Facebook doesn’t actually fit into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and Facebook is instead serving as an online publisher (a member of the press) and therefore is supposed to be legally responsible for what is being posted to their site — responsible for it in just the same way that the New York Times and Washington Post and NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, are responsible for what they publish (responsible, that is, to civil suits, but not to any criminal laws). Soros isn’t hiring lawyers to present such a case against Facebook, which would be a serious case to present, holding Facebook liable for any libels that it has published; he is instead trying to smear the leaders of Facebook, without supplying facts, or, really, any case, at all.

He is not objecting to the Trump Administration’s prejudicially granting this non-enforcement to Facebook, the publisher — the Trump Administration’s treating them as if they weren’t being publishers, but just passive information-providers; treating them as if Facebook weren’t selecting what to transmit and what not to transmit on their networks, to their audience. (Facebook, and other online media such as Twitter, don’t even hide the fact that they exercise censorship, while they claim to be only “passive” media and thus protected by Section 230. Like I said: this case against Facebook would be serious, if it were brought, because these online platforms really do censor-out whatever they wish to censor-out.)

Why did Soros object to Facebook’s controllers, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, instead of object to Donald Trump — who is granting this prejudicial treatment, to that publisher (allowing it to be treated in accord with the Section 230 exemption)? Is it because Soros is too stupid to know better, or to understand the difference?

Soros knows enough to be expressing his viewpoint in a partisan manner, as a Democrat who spends tens of millions of dollars each election-cycle in order to support conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats. (For example: in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primaries, between the conservative liberal Hillary Clinton and the progressive Bernie Sanders, Soros’s spokesman said that “Soros is supporting pro-Clinton super PACs because ‘Mr. Soros believes Hillary Clinton is the most qualified candidate to be president.’” He said this after Hillary’s disastrous record as Secretary of State, such as on Libya, “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha!!”) And, then, in the general election, Soros supports conservative Democrats (such as that same conservative liberal Clinton) against sometimes even more conservative Republican Party nominees, for the given federal office. (The idea that Soros pumps about himself, that he’s progressive, is one big fat lie: he’s nothing of the sort.)

Why would he not be objecting to Trump here — the Republican who will soon be running against whomever the Democratic Party chooses to be its nominee? The reason is that Trump isn’t really his target here: this is not the season during which the President will be chosen, but is instead the season in which each Party is to be selecting its nominee to then run against the other Parties’ nominees. And, since Soros is addressing, really (and only), fellow Democrats, his agenda could reasonably be viewed as being to affect whom they will be voting for in the present primaries.

In other words, George Soros wants as free a hand as possible, as a Democratic Party mega-donor, in order to determine whom the Democratic Party’s nominee will be. He wants Facebook to be censoring his way, not their way. Then, later, if that nominee suits his purposes, Soros will donate funds proportionately, to that Democratic Party nominee, against Donald Trump. Perhaps right now Soros is using the opinion-page of the Democratic Party’s New York Times in order to warn Facebook to avoid using its censorship so as to favor and oppose ‘the wrong’ Democratic Party candidates. And, maybe, that newspaper favors and opposes the same candidates that Soros does, and so perhaps that’s why they published his tripe here, rather than higher-quality submissions they could have chosen instead to publish.

Google, during the 2016 election-cycle, was slanting its ‘news’ to favor conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats, and then to favor the Democratic Party nominees against the Republican Party’s nominees, whereas Facebook was slanting its ‘news’ to favor Republican Party nominees against Democratic Party nominees. Twitter censors-out whatever neither Party wants the public to know, such as that Julian Assange is being tortured awaiting his extradition to the U.S. — for a trial that will likely never happen — all of these years of his imprisonment, lately in solitary confinement moreover, and never once being tried in a court of law, for anything, at all.

Since George Soros is a Democratic Party billionaire, he is objecting against Facebook instead of against Google. Similarly, Republican Party billionaires (and the ‘news’-media that they control) attack Google and other pro-Democratic-Party media.

Thus, Soros says “Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them” instead of: “President Trump is not enforcing federal laws that hold publishers liable for lies they publish.”

After all: Soros himself was — along with the U.S. Government and the Netherlands Government — one of the top three funders of a television station in Kiev Ukraine that promoted ethnic cleansing against the predominantly ethnic Russian residents in far eastern Ukraine where 90% of the population had voted for the democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, whom America’s Democratic Party President Barack Obama had just overthrown in a very bloody coup that was covered-over by ‘popular demonstrations’ which had actually been organized inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and which had aimed at creating in Ukraine a rabidly anti-Russian government on Russia’s doorstep. Obama had even been planning by no later than June 2013 to install in Crimea a U.S. naval base to replace Russia’s largest naval base, which was (and remains) located there, in Crimea. The ‘popular demonstrations’ against Yanukovych didn’t even start until 21 November 2013, and they were organized starting on 1 March 2013 inside America’s Ukraine Embassy. The organizing for them started by no later than June 2011. The ethnic cleansing was acknowledged by Ukrainian officials and was very effective, but Soros wanted yet more of it to be done, and he urged an additional $50 billion for it to be publicly financed as an ‘investment’ in ‘democracy’. So, Soros knows, and understands, a thing or two about propaganda. And, of course, he knows that Julian Assange is his enemy, just as much as Assange is, say, an enemy of Google’s Eric Schmidt, and of Cambridge Analytica’s Peter Thiel (who supported Trump).

This is just a game that virtually all of the billionaires play, against democracy itself. They want to control the country. Ever since around 1980, they have been accustomed to doing so.

* The U.S. Constitution, in its First Amendment, prohibited any type of governmentally imposed censorship but allowed censorship by members of the privately owned “press.” Section 230 was written to exclude passive online providers from being referred to as being “press” or a “publisher,” but it was poorly written, by lobbyists for corporations in the same category as Facebook and Google, and has yet to be revised by lobbyists for their print and broadcast competitors, who might define more precisely Section 230’s key phrase “interactive computer service” so as to state explicitly that only passive ones are being referred to by that phrase. Right now, even the New York Times online could conceivably qualify as being not a “publisher” and therefore not liable as publishers have been in the past. A corrupt government writes laws corruptly (such as Section 230 is) so that the laws reflect little else than the contending mega-corporate interests; and Section 230 is an example of this (as are most of our laws). With a big enough budget for its lawyering, any mega-corporation or association of large corporations can get the laws, in a corrupt country, written so as to serve its interests. Of course, such a country is no democracy. (But a corrupt country will have a corrupt press so that the public will think it’s a democracy.) Under such circumstances, judges make the final decision in particular cases. There already do exist some legal precedents for interpreting “interactive computer service” to apply only to passive ones. However, most billionaires are probably similar to Soros in wanting the internet to continue being used so as to propagandize the public — shape people’s attitudes and beliefs — instead of to inform the public (which entails no censorship whatsoever and is therefore overwhelmingly disfavored by billionaires and their corporations and their PACs and their lobbyists). Julian Assange is an example of the way a billionaires-controlled world treats leading anti-censorship activists. America is becoming a bastion of censorship, as one would expect of any dictatorship. This is certainly not what the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution had intended or even expected. After 9/11, it has become a seemingly permanent police-state. It’s what one would expect from a country that’s controlled by its billionaires. The 2020 U.S. elections should be about this problem, but, of course, are not.

Billionaires Have Declared All-Out War on Sanders and Warren

A A — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 10:25:32 +0000

Norman SOLOMON

For many decades, any politician daring to fight for economic justice was liable to be denounced for engaging in “class warfare.” It was always a grimly laughable accusation, coming from wealthy elites as well as their functionaries in corporate media and elective office. In the real world, class warfare — or whatever you want to call it — has always been an economic and political reality.

In recent decades, class war in the USA has become increasingly lopsided. The steady decline in union membership, the worsening of income inequality and the hollowing out of the public sector have been some results of ongoing assaults on social decency and countless human lives. Corporate power has run amuck.

Now, the billionaire class is worried. For the first time in memory, there’s a real chance that the next president could threaten the very existence of billionaires — or at least significantly reduce their unconscionable rate of wealth accumulation — in a country and on a planet with so much human misery due to extreme economic disparities.

When Elizabeth Warren stands on a debate stage and argues for a targeted marginal tax on the astronomically rich, such advocacy is anathema to those who believe that the only legitimate class war is the kind waged from the top down. In early autumn, CNBC reported that “Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.”

As for Bernie Sanders — less than four years after he carried every county in West Virginia against Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary — the state’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin flatly declared last week that if Sanders wins the nomination, he would not vote for his party’s nominee against Trump in November 2020.

Some billionaires support Trump and some don’t. But few billionaires have a good word to say about Sanders or Warren. And the pattern of billionaires backing their Democratic rivals is illuminating.

“Dozens of American billionaires have pulled out their checkbooks to support candidates engaged in a wide-open battle for the Democratic presidential nomination,” Forbes reported this summer. The dollar total of those donations given directly to a campaign (which federal law limits to $2,800 each) is less significant than the sentiment they reflect. And people with huge wealth are able to dump hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at once into a Super PAC, which grassroots-parched AstroTurf candidate Joe Biden greenlighted last month.

The donations from billionaires to the current Democratic candidates could be viewed as a kind of Oligarchy Confidence Index, based on data from the Federal Election Commission. As reported by Forbes, Pete Buttigieg leads all the candidates with 23 billionaire donors, followed by 18 for Cory Booker, and 17 for Kamala Harris. Among the other candidates who have qualified for the debate coming up later this month, Biden has 13 billionaire donors and Amy Klobuchar has 8, followed by 3 for Elizabeth Warren, 1 for Tulsi Gabbard, and 1 for Andrew Yang. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has zero billionaire donors.

(The tenth person who has qualified for the next debate, self-funding billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, is in a class by himself.)

Meanwhile, relying on contributions from small donors, Sanders and Warren “eagerly bait, troll and bash billionaires at every opportunity,” in the words of a recent Los Angeles Times news story. “They send out missives to donors boasting how much damage their plans would inflict on the wallets of specific wealthy families and corporations.”

The newspaper added: “Sanders boasts that his wealth tax would cost Amazon owner Jeff Bezos $8.9 billion per year. He even championed a bill with the acronym BEZOS: The Stop Bad Employers By Zeroing Out Subsidies Act would have forced Amazon and other large firms to pay the full cost of food stamps and other benefits received by their lowest-wage employees.”

For extremely rich people who confuse net worth with human worth, the prospect of losing out on billions is an outrageous possibility. And so, a few months ago, Facebook mega-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg expressed his antipathy toward Warren while meeting with employees. As a transcript of leaked audio makes clear, Warren’s vision of using anti-trust laws to break up Big Tech virtual monopolies was more than Facebook’s head could stand to contemplate.

“But look,” Zuckerberg said, “at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

The fight happening now for the Democratic presidential nomination largely amounts to class warfare. And the forces that have triumphed in the past are outraged that they currently have to deal with so much progressive opposition. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”

truthdig.com