Even if Joe Biden didn’t steal the election, he certainly bought it through a record-breaking amount from anonymous donors whom Democrats have decried for years until 2020.
A Bloomberg investigation, which not so ironically came after the election rather than before it, noted that “the public will never have a full accounting of who helped him win the White House.”
Biden’s winning campaign received $145 million in so-called “dark money donations,” or roughly 10 percent of his record-breaking campaign chest of $1.5 billion.
Biden’s haul of dark money dwarfed the $28.4 million spent on behalf of Donald Trump tops the previous record of $113 million in anonymous donations backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.
In the past, many Democrats wanted to ban dark money since it allowed supporters to quietly back a candidate without scrutiny and obtain undue influence over victorious candidates. But in their effort to defeat Trump in 2020, they embraced dark money.
For example, Bloomberg reported that Priorities USA Action Fund, the super political action committee that Biden designated as his preferred vehicle for outside spending, used $26 million in funds originally donated to its nonprofit arm, called Priorities USA, to back Biden. The donors of that money do not have to be disclosed.
Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, was unapologetic in comments to Bloomberg. “We weren’t going to unilaterally disarm against Trump and the right-wing forces that enabled him,” he said.
Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence big money has over politicians. But the system has gaping loopholes, which groups backing Biden exploited.
In fact, the Biden campaign called for banning some types of nonprofits from spending money to influence elections and requiring that any organization spending more than $10,000 to influence elections to register with the Federal Election Commission and disclose any donors.
Overall, Democrats received $326 million in dark money, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was more than twice the $148 million that supported Republican groups.
Bloomberg found that Future Forward PAC, a super-PAC that spent $104 million backing Biden, got $46.9 million Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, $3 million from Twilio Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson, and $2.6 million from Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. But the most significant source of funds was from a sister nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, which contributed $61 million. The names of those who put up the $61 million don’t have to be disclosed.
I guess you aren’t exactly stealing an election if you buy it with questionable donations, but it’s awfully close.
I was planning on reviewing Parler on my quest to look for Facebook alternatives, and then Parler essentially disappeared. At least you could find websites that hosted articles about Parler disappearing. But what if you plugged in a website, and it never appeared? Think that couldn’t happen?
Think again. For 2021, I’m predicting that the next big thing in censorship will be DNS censorship.
DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s a process that your web browser uses to turn the website that you type in (say, gab.com) into an IP address that the computer can actually use to route traffic. Your web browser sends a request to a DNS resolver, which talks to a name server to find the address for the website you requested. This DNS resolver then sends that IP address to your browser, which then lets your browser get the information you requested from the website. DNS resolution is one of those background tasks that just sort of works without you thinking about it.
You shouldn’t assume this is going to work well in the future. With Parler’s obvious targeting by Apple, Google and Amazon all at once, if you had doubts about FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) censorship, your doubts should be cleared up now. But imagine if you attempted to go to the “next great conservative website,” only to find it was “down.” No matter what you enter into your browser, it never resolved the website.
Like most people, you’re probably using Google’s public DNS server, 8.8.8.8, and its alternate, 8.8.4.4, without even knowing it. That means that any website you enter into the address bar of your browser has to get approval from Google to be shown to you. If you don’t think that’s a problem, read Google’s own FAQ page:
Does Google Public DNS offer the ability to block or filter out unwanted sites?
Google Public DNS is purely a DNS resolution and caching server; it does not perform any blocking or filtering of any kind, except that it may not resolve certain domains in extraordinary cases if we believe this is necessary to protect Google’s users from security threats. But we believe that blocking functionality is usually best performed by the client. If you are interested in enabling such functionality, you should consider installing a client-side application or browser add-on for this purpose.
“…protect Google’s users from security threats.” Hmmm. Like the Capitol protests? Or “domestic terrorism?”
I’m skeptical, and while there isn’t a lot of evidence its happening now, I think its the next obvious web censorship step against anything conservative on the internet.
Yup, its coming
Fortunately there are options. CloudFlare right now seems to be sticking to neutrality, and has been concerned for years about web censorship. Their DNS servers are 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, and I recommend you setup your computer to use them before Google’s DNS server finds a way to blacklist your conservative websites in order to “ensure the security and continuing stability” or “protect users from security threats,” for a “safe and secure society” of course.
PC Mag and Toms Hardware both have easy to use guides on changing your DNS server. I also recommend you log into your router and change the DNS server there. It’s a small pain, but unless you want websites to suddenly disappear like the Tiananmen Square Massacre, you’ll need to start thinking about what other back-end processes can be altered against your will.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, after what CNN deemed “a fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”
By John Ruberry
Wednesday was a dark day in American history. Most of the blame for the riot at the US Capitol deservedly goes to the hooligans, about 1,500 of them, who broke through blockades and defied law enforcement and entered the Capitol building–the first such mass hostile group to do so since British forces marched in during the War of 1812 before setting it ablaze.
Many of the thugs who illegally entered the Capitol have been arrested and they deserve, if found guilty, to face the full brunt of the law.
This was not, as the media deemed last year’s many instances of “unrest” in American cities, “a mostly peaceful protest.”
President Donald J. Trump is by no means blameless. He should have conceded his loss to Joe Biden weeks ago. I support Trump’s fight for free and fair elections. But even in states where the vote count was the most questionable, Pennsylvania and Georgia, had their electoral votes magically gone to the president, Trump still would have lost. And while I disagree with the mainstream media blowhards and Democratic politicians who said Trump incited the crowd to riot, he gave some of the protesters hope. Normally hope is a good thing to spread but he gave some people the belief that their protest might have compelled Congress to ignore the Electoral College and keep Trump in the White House. That was never going to happen.
On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday night he asked that we look at why the protesters–not just the rioters–attended the rally. They were angry.
Why?
In November a Rasmussen poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters believed the presidential election was stolen. Even many Democrats agreed. As for myself I don’t believe the election was stolen. My view is that the weak standards with mail-in voting, put in place on a widespread basis for the first time in many states because of the COVID-19 epidemic, has something to do with that. Mail-in voting, without safeguards, makes such crimes as voting twice or more, dead people voting, and voting in a jurisdiction when you live someplace else more likely.
While elections need to continue to be run at the state level Congress should, if such a thing is possible, have an open mind in regards to exploring new nationwide election standards, such as what was done after the Florida recount debacle of 2000. Banning ballot harvesting is a good place to start, as well as replacing early voting, that is “election season,” with–and this is an idea that comes from the liberals–making the day of a general election a work holiday. And photo ID should be required for voting too.
If millions of Americans don’t have faith in the election process then democracy rests on a flimsy leaf.
Now let’s look at the mainstream media and Big Tech. I’ll be brief only for the sake of not overwhelming you. I could bring up dozens of examples of media bias but I won’t for now.
For over four years most of the media flogged a dead horse of a story in Russian collusion. There was no Trump-Russia collusion. Zero. Robert Mueller’s exhaustive investigation found none. That didn’t stop the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC from hawking it, not so subtly, as the way to oust Trump from power for nearly four years nearly every day.
Meanwhile the Hunter Biden laptop story was minimized by that same mainstream media during the 2020 campaign. The younger Biden’s alleged influence peddling activities are not a nothing-burger. And Facebook and Twitter for a while blocked the posting the New York Post story about the deeply troubling news that the former vice president’s son might be compromised by foreign governments, including our greatest rival, China. Twitter, in a preview of 2021’s ongoing purge of conservatives that includes Trump, from the microblogging platform, locked the Post out of its account for nearly two weeks. Free press anyone? The suppression worked. Many people I spoke with, folks who only get their news from Facebook, never heard about the Hunter laptop scandal until I told them about it.
Trump’s core base of supporters are voracious consumers of news–and yes, to be fair of course some of their news stories come from Facebook and Twitter, unless of course they’ve been purged from those sites. And the double-standard of most of the media on those two stories seethes the Trump base.
After the riot the media continued its dismissive attitude of Trump supporters.
Anderson Cooper of CNN, a scion of the Vanderbilt family that got filthy rich during the Gilded Age, said of the protesters after the riot. “And they’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and talk about the great day they had in Washington … They stood up for nothing other than mayhem.”
Clearly Cooper dines at what he deems are better restaurants than the Olive Garden. And he can afford to stay at the finest hotels, places that are beyond my financial reach. And yes, I’ve stayed at those hotels Cooper denigrated. I’ve eaten at the Olive Garden a few times.
Another cruel irony of the mainstream media coverage of the Capitol riot is that they deemed it one, while they went to great pains to call the many urban riots of 2020–which occurred almost exclusively in Democrat-run cities–anything but that. While storming the Capitol is clearly a much different dimension than looting and arson, and yes, a very disturbing one, the hypocrisy of the media is apparent to a 10-year-old.
More than ever we need new media. If you agree with my post, especially if you dine at the Olive Garden, stop seething. Start your own blog. WordPress and Blogger.com are good places to start. Even if you have just ten readers a day–my own blog has many more than that in case you are wondering–you will be making a difference. Besides, much of the mainstream media, particularly daily newspapers, are endangered species. Warren Buffett, no conservative, expects only a few of them to survive and he made that prediction before the COVID-19 outbreak that has devastated their ad revenue. Those papers, for the most part, take their lead in reporting news from the aforementioned Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s where they learn not to use words like “riot” unless it involves conservatives. They invent terms like “mostly peaceful” or sugarcoat the carnage by saying it is “unrest.” Those last two newspapers aren’t going anyhere but we can fight back with reality. An army of mosquitoes can make a difference.
Update (DTG) I put something like this in as a comment but figured it belonged as a post update as this has gotten instalanched. (Thanks Ed)
John is one one my original magnificent seven bloggers/ He produces quality work and I’m proud to have him here.
I believe he is completely wrong about the election not being stolen, both math, the actions of the left and common sense in my opinion scream it to be the case, but he has the right to his opinion and I respect that he comes by it honestly and have no problem with him expressing it here.
If anyone has problem with him expressing that opinion on my site and want him off for having & expressing it, well that’s too bad.
The competition for worst big city mayor is fierce, New York’s Bill de Blasio and Eric Garcetti typically lead the pack but don’t overlook Lori Lightfoot of Chicago.
How did America’s third-largest city get there?
Lightfoot’s victory in last year’s election was a fluke. She and Toni “Taxwinkle” Preckwinkle, the president of the Cook County Board emerged as the top two candidates after a 14-candidate first round of balloting–she collected only 17-percent of the vote. Lightfoot, used her endorsement by the Chicago Sun-Times and her time as chair of the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards to fashion herself as the reform candidate. Her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, decided not to run for a third term; it’s widely believed his blocking the release of a video until after his 2015 reelection of the shameful deadly police shooting of Laquan McDonald led to his bowing out.
Now there is a another video. Late in Emanuel’s second term Chicago police officers raided the apartment of social worker Anjanette Young. But they busted into the wrong home. Guns were drawn and Young was handuffed naked while she screamed. “You’ve got the wrong place.” She said that 43 times. Lightfoot’s campaign slogan was “Let There Be Light” and this was her opportunity to be transparent in a time of crisis.
Then the woman often derisively called “Mayor Beetlejuice” claimed that she wasn’t aware of the raid on Young’s home. But emails show that Lightfoot learned about the raid in November of 2019, around the time CBS Chicago began reporting on it. She says she “focused on budget issues” at that time and the could explain why she has no recall of the emails.
Lightfoot also admitted that she was wrong when she said that Young hadn’t filed a Freedom of Information Request for the video of the raid. The victim had in fact done so.
At best, Lightfoot’s Chicago is circling the drain. Yes, she inherited a mess. Even before the COVID-19 epidemic Chicago was losing residents. Chicago’s public-worker pension worker plans are the worst-funded of any big city. But Lightfoot’s lockdown orders are best draconian, she hasn’t been taken to task as much as she deserves for that only because her fellow Democrat, blowhard governor JB Pritzker, has been all over local media almost daily trying to frighten Illinoisans into compliance with his own lockdown orders.
The day before the second round of widespread looting and rioting, deemed “unrest” of course by the mainstream media, Lightfoot followed through on her threat to close the vast Montrose Beach to visitors because she thought too many people gathered there on a gorgeous late summer afternoon.
In the spring Lighfoot scolded Chicagoan by declaring “getting your roots done is not essential.” During that first lockdown, which closed all hair salons, the mayor got her stylist, maskless, to do her hair.
When confronted with a predictable uproar for her hypocrisy, Beetlejuice doubled down, “I’m the public face of this city, I’m on national media and I’m out in the public eye.”
Last month a few days before imposing a second COVID-19 lockdown, Lightfoot appeared, maskless, outdoors at a spontaneous rally at an unsafe distance with many others as she celebrated the media calling the presidential election for Joe Biden.
Chicago, a failed city, has the perfect person to represent it in the public eye.
