“Progressive” and Administration efforts to shut up conservatives are continuing apace as the nation gets set for another ugly round of elections.
One of their latest memes? “Dark Money”.
To hear the usual liberal suspects (including most of the “news” media – “Dark Money” is an insidious scourge against Democracy.
But of course, the definition depends entirely on who’s using it. And I don’t entirely mean “if it’s Alita Messinger, it’s OK”.
No, the hypocrisy goes deeper than that:
The HuffPo and the rest of the left define “dark money” groups as non-profits who don’t have to disclose the identity of donors. This non-disclosure of donors is actually a byproduct of the civil rights struggle, when the government sought to protect donors from intimidation by groups like the KKK. Given that conservatives feel the need for anonymity over their political speech is a stark reflection of how far leftist rhetoric has devolved.
And why do conservative donors feel the need to protect their identities?
Ahead of his reelection in 2012, President Obama published an “enemies list” of donors to his opponent Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign even urged supporters to “report” attacks on the President’s record. Business Frank VanderSloot found himself the subject of two IRS audits, an investigation by the Department of Labor and the subject of an investigation by a Democrat Senate staffer, just days and weeks after being publicly named as a major Romney donor.
At the end of 2013, a cancer patient, Bill Elliot, went public with the news that his health insurance had been cancelled due to ObamaCare. An insurance broker, C. Steven Tucker, heard about his situation and helped Elliot get new insurance coverage. Both men appeared in the press about the events. Both men also, on the exact same day, were notified by the IRS that they were being audited.
Given the details revealed last year about how the IRS targeted conservative and grass roots organizations for extraordinary scrutiny and review, it is not unreasonable for conservatives to worry that they will be targeted for their political activity.
And like the campaign against ALEC, it’s all further evidence in favor of Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals attack conservatives motives, commitment to freedom or ethics, it’s a cover for something they’re doing themselves.
But this year, there’s the added imperative change the conversation.
To anything!
The left knows they are at a disadvantage. HuffPo’s warning about “dark money” is just the first salvo in the campaign to silence the right this year. To paraphrase the old legal saw, if neither the facts or the law are on your side, pound the table. The left is going to pound the table loudly until November.
Look for the scourge of ALEC to make its reappearance as the Minnesota legislative sessions re-opens next month.
A parasitic liberal acquaintance is circulating a petition from a Kay Hagan, NC senatorial candidate, on Facebook. She says the petition is to “end Citizens United” which she claims to have “opened the floodgates” of special interest and “unlimited corporate” money in elections. Of course Rove, the Kochs, and all the predictable buzz words are in play throughout her ad. She also touts an “American Anti-Corruption Act” as a means to salvation for “the people.”
Never heard of her, but I suspect that her campaign must be terribly under-funded. Not sure how such a group is able to be legally “ended” but it certainly appears that your assertion that campaign finance will become a newly manufactured crisis in upcoming elections is right on …
I’ve never met a liberal who actually read the Citizens United v FEC decision, let alone met a liberal who can discuss it intelligently. The supreme court did not decide that ‘corporations are people’. It decided, quite sensibly, that people acting together have the same free speech right that people do when they act individually, and that the federal government of he United States is not allowed to pre-emptively ban speech it believes negatively affects its interests. Is that so hard to understand?
Powhatan’s comment suggests that we ought to be mocking the left more, if indeed his reading of Citizens United is correct.
Here’s the text, BTW:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
I’ll join in the mockery if I end up agreeing, which I suspect I will.
Well, if we could have banned General Mills from trying to overturn Minnesota’s marriage laws………..
I think that it is accurate to say that the majority in Citizens United was non-plussed at the sweeping speech banning and regulating claims of the United States government. The FEC argued that it had the right to erase texts from citizens’ ebook readers if it wished.
The US ain’t Canada, thank God!
Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks was on Fox this morning and said that the IRS is doubling down of their efforts. Apparently, the Gestapo, I mean the IRS, is seeking public comment on the new rules that they are planning, which only affects conservative groups. Meanwhile, unions and other left wing groups get by without the same scrutiny. He asked everyone to contact their congressional reps and to go to the IRS public comment web site and tell them to back off. Sorry, I don’t have the link.
PM: It is impossible in practice to distinguish between a group of people who gather together to pool capital to promote a political idea (a union, the Sierra club), and a group of people who gather together to pool capital to conduct a business. Many groups do some of each. That is the heart of the Citizens United decision. Groups of people were being restrained from collectively expressing political speech by campaign reform law. In order to free some groups of people to speak freely on political issues (surely a fundamental right), all groups of people, including those represented by corporations, had to be allowed to speak freely. There were never any restrictions on billionaires speaking freely. Citizens United extended the same freedom to groups.
I read enough of CU to mock. If we want to get the money out of politics, we need to get the money out of government. People are only “shopping in the store” because there is something there to buy, and it’s a lot easier than working.
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