Zuckerberg and other wealthy West Coast investors created FWD.us in 2013 to help to push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and population-growth bill through Congress.
Joe Biden is great on immigration. I guess depends on your perspective. If you’re a human trafficker, or drug dealer, you’d give him an A-plus, but the American people would give him an F. The crisis at our border was not only entirely predictable, it was predicted. I predicted that if you campaign all year long on open borders, amnesty, and health care for illegals, you’re going to get more migrants at the border. That’s what’s happened since the election
SEN. TOM COTTON
Hispanic Caucus Eyes Big Amnesty After Biden Meeting with DACA Illegal Aliens
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is eyeing a big legislative push for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens living in the United States, hoping to ride a wave of momentum after President Joe Biden met with illegal aliens at the White House.
Last week, Biden met with illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program who urged him to help pass a series of amnesty bills — including one that would put the roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. on a path to obtaining American citizenship while doubling legal immigration levels.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with 38 members, has officially endorsed an amnesty bill that would give amnesty to at least 5.2 million illegal aliens deemed “essential.”
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) said in a statement:
Immigrant essential workers have been on the frontlines working to keep us safe, healthy, and fed during the pandemic. The Department of Homeland Security designated these immigrant workers as essential and part of our country’s infrastructure. Supporting essential workers means supporting economic growth and productivity for our nation.
In April, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), a co-sponsor of the amnesty bill, wrote to Biden asking him to include the plan in any economic recovery package, calling illegal aliens “American heroes.”
Likewise, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is requesting that the U.S. Senate and the Biden administration prioritize an amnesty for about 4.4 million illegal aliens.
Ruiz said in a statement following Biden’s meeting with DACA illegal aliens:
I am incredibly proud of each Dreamer who met with President Biden today, including United Farm Workers’ Leydy Rangel from my hometown of Coachella, California. As Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, I thank President Biden for his commitment to securing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers.
Also part of the amnesty push are corporate interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations, as well as former President George W. Bush.
As Breitbart News reported, Bush, joined by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the refugee lobby, the Chamber, and the Business Roundtable, is lobbying Congress to increase legal immigration levels and give amnesty to illegal aliens, claiming it will end illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
While Biden, Democrats, corporate interests, and Bush call for passage of the expansive amnesty bills, about 16.4 million Americans remain jobless and another 5.2 million are underemployed but want full-time jobs.
A flooded U.S. labor market has been well documented for its wage-crushing side effects, so much so that economist George Borjas has called mass immigration the “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of America’s working and lower-middle class. The biggest winners are corporations and investors who can keep the cost of labor low and have a steady stream of consumers to buy their products and services.
Other research finds current legal immigration to the U.S. results in more than $530 billion worth of lost wages for Americans.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), likewise, has repeatedly noted mass immigration cuts Americans’ wages.
In 2013, CBO analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for the American workers. A 2020 CBO analysis stated “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals get temporary visas to fill U.S. jobs that would otherwise go to Americans. Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, as well, enter the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Pressures Joe Biden to Revive Amnesty Giveaway
Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-migration group, FWD.us, is using its influence in President Joe Biden’s White House to save Zuckerberg’s immigration agenda from Biden’s border policies.
The influence was highlighted on May 14 when Biden met with several migrants who were given work permits by President Barack Obama’s 2012 DACA directive. The six migrants were led by Maria Praeli, who works as the government relations manager for the many wealthy investors in Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group.
Biden echoed FWD.us’ 2021 amnesty strategy in a statement after meeting Praeli and the other migrants:
Today, President Biden met with six DACA recipients who work in health care, education, and agriculture to discuss their experiences on the frontlines of the pandemic. President Biden reiterated his support for Dreamers, TPS holders, farmworkers, and other essential immigrant workers.
That meeting was followed by a provocative statement from the press secretary — “DACA recipients are … kind of what the American Dream represents” — but got little Friday evening attention in the establishment media.
But that limited publicity is just fine with the White House, responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He said:
The administration would like nothing more than to fully implement FWD.us’ agenda — but it is just that they have political concerns. They’re not stupid, they read the polls, they know that immigration is the President’s major weakness with voters.
[…] It’s a theatrical performance where they pretend to be reluctant and ambivalent while the outside groups like FWD.us push them [for more]. That serves both of their purposes because the administration gets to say [to voters]; “Look, we’re not crazy, we’re in the middle.”
The meeting is one example of FWD.us and its friends influencing Biden’s labor and migration policies, amid the animosity of many progressives towards Zuckerberg for Facebook’s pre-2021 refusal to muzzle then-President Donald Trump.
For example, Biden’s main immigration bill was introduced on January 20. It includes many changes championed by Zuckerberg and his wealthy coastal investors at FWD.us. Those changes include a rule allowing all employers to recruit an unlimited supply of foreign graduates with the dangled promise of green cards for a decade’s work. Similarly, Biden’s Department of Labor has blocked a Donald Trump-directed wage raise for visa workers that FWD.us opposed.
The blocked wage-raise reduces pressure on Fortune 500 companies to hire American graduates.
But Biden’s unpopular amnesty agenda has largely been swept aside by his unpopular border policy which opened the southern borders to a growing flood of economic migrants from Central America, South America, and other regions around the world. That border policy has created a humanitarian emergency in Mexico, and a rating crisis for him — despite the U.S. media’s eager focus on the smaller inflow of the left-behind children of illegal migrants — plus an easy excuse for GOP Senators to shrug off pro-amnesty pressure from their business donors.
Zuckerberg and other wealthy West Coast investors created FWD.us in 2013 to help to push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty and population-growth bill through Congress.
The group’s collective goals are simple: Pump up stock prices by importing extra consumers and workers, of whatever skill or age, regardless of the damage to the migrants’ home countries.
For example, the 2013 bill would have boosted many investors by delivering roughly 20 million extra consumers, workers, and renters. That inflow would have shifted many billions of dollars from wage earners to investors, according to a 2013 report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The investors push for their goals regardless of the damage to their political allies. For example, the 2013 push was an electoral disaster for Democrats, who lost their Senate majority after 2014 voters ejected five Democratic senators. Similarly, President George W. Bush’s two amnesty bills helped get his ratings below 30 percent.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at the other sites.
Since 2014, FWD.us and its education fund have spent at least $50 million to build a nationwide network of organizers and allies.
Throughout President Donald Trump’s four years, the group’s funding and allied lawyers helped to slow and block many of Trump’s pro-American initiatives, including his plans to help American graduates win the many white-collar jobs that are now held by foreign visa-workers. For example, the FWD.us group led the campaign to save the DACA work-permit giveaway and won many state-level gains for the employers of illegal migrants.
The group spends heavily to promote the sympathy-inducing stories of pitiable migrants and minimize coverage of the huge economic distortions imposed on Americans by the federal government’s inflation of the nation’s labor supply and the demand for housing.
In 2021, FWD.us is playing a leading role in the progressives’ 2021 “We Are Home” amnesty campaign, and its allies cooperate with the cheap labor push by George W. Bush and the Koch network.
FWD.us reveals little about its management or spending. The group declined to answer questions from Breitbart News.
The board reportedly includes David Plouffe, the manager of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign. Zuckerberg hired Plouffe as a political advisor shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration and gave him access to massive funding via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2020, Plouffe used Zuckerberg’s money to fund get-out-the-vote campaigns in many Democrat-dominated districts. That accomplishment may have reduced the widespread anti-Facebook mood among progressives during President Donald Trump’s four years.
The founders of FWD.us included investors Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker. and Ron Conway, who led advocacy efforts for Silicon Valley even before 2013. Until Biden was elected, Conway and Hoffman employed Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.
Conway is now working with FWD.us member Sean Parker to spike housing prices by letting state governments and influential employers import foreign workers for jobs needed by Americans. Their proposal is also included in Biden’s January 20 immigration bill.
The President of FWD.us, Todd Schulte, is a career Democrat staffer. He was chief of staff at the Priorities USA Action pro-Obama group before joining FWD.us in 2013.
The deputy leader of FWD.us, Alida Garcia, sat on the steering committee for the progressive amnesty campaign. But she took a short-lived White House job in mid-March. The campaign announced March 19:
FWD.us Vice President of Advocacy and We Are Home Steering Committee member Alida Garcia is taking temporary leave to serve as the White House’s Senior Adviser for Migration Outreach and Engagement.
The group seems to have very close ties to Alejandro Mayorkas, the pro-migratio0n secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. FWD.us supported his nomination, and Mayorkas has since hired many migration activists from groups backed by FWD.us. For example, Mayorkas hired Lucas Guttentag, a pro-migration lawyer at Stanford and Yale whose anti-Trump project was backed by FWD.us.
FWD.us can also call upon a network of contractors, alumni — such as Mike Troncoso — and corporate allies to help shape White House policy.
Biden’s agencies are “loaded with [pro-migration] appointees from the various activist groups that FWD.us and other organizations fund and coordinate,” said Krikorian. “The White House is more cautious because it has to actually answer to the voters, and it has a broader agenda than just immigration.”
There have been few behind-the-scenes leaks from Biden’s White House, partly because Biden has hired far fewer D.C.-outsiders than did President Donald Trump. Biden’s core group of long-time staffers guard their boss and only leak vague descriptions of internal debates. For example, in April, media outlets struggled to understand Biden’s instant reversal after his staffers announced on April 16 the government would only accept 15,000 refugees in 2021.
But what is clear is that FWD.us and its allies sharply criticized the 15,000 decision as soon as it was announced, and before Biden reversed the policy:
At some of our best moments, America has been a beacon of hope and a nation that actively seeks to welcome those seeking refuge—and at some of our worst, we turned our back on those very people in their time of greatest need … today’s decision is not only morally wrong, but will make the forced migration situation from Central America worse.
We strongly urge President Biden to reverse this decision and commit to his prior promises to rebuild America’s refugee program.
FWD.us is rarely mentioned in the establishment media, despite its central role in labor policy, migration policies, and the amnesty debate.
When FWD.us does get mentioned, the coverage is very deferential. Few — if any — reporters are willing to identify the funders and purposes of the advocacy group.
The Associated Press, for example, merely described FWD.us as an “immigrant advocacy group.” HuffPost.com described Praeli as “a government manager at the immigrant rights group Fwd.us.” The New York Times‘ White House correspondent, Michael Shear, described it as “a pro-immigrants rights group.” Similarly, CNN interviewed Schulte on March 17, while describing him only as an “immigration and criminal justice advocate [with] a long history on this issue.”
THE BIDEN AMNESTY
…or will it be continued non-enforcement? No matter, Wall Street will write it!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/bidens-plan-to-fix-americas-jobless.html
THE BIDEN AMNESTY - Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine labor rights, and even redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities. NEIL MUNRO
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.
Why You Need to Read Josh Hawley’s The Tyranny of Big Tech
After the corporate media firestorm following the events at Capitol Hill on January 6th, Missouri senator Josh Hawley had a wakeup call. His publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped his book, The Tyranny of Big Tech. They blamed him for taking part in a “disturbing, deadly insurrection,” and decided to punish him accordingly.
Within days, Hawley’s book had a new publisher. Conservative house Regnery Publishing is dedicated to “building strong minds and fostering rigorous debate.” It saw value in the hefty topic which Hawley has taken on for the majority of his career: reigning in big tech monopolies.
This book is a crash course in the history of monopolies and corporate liberalism which led to the rise of big tech. From the birth of the railway industry to the current state of online censorship, Hawley offers readers the information they need to take back control of their privacy and communications.
Big Tech corporations have already paid numerous fines for violating antitrust laws across the globe. They are constantly under investigation for suppressing information and potentially did so to sway the 2020 election. Facebook and Twitter are especially noted for suppressing important information in the last Presidential election regarding Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s potentially illegal business dealings with Ukraine.
Facebook actively censored the story and Twitter went even further. It disconnected users’ ability to retweet, link, or DM the story. Only after the election, in December, did federal prosecutors confirm that Biden’s son was under investigation for the alleged crimes.
Hawley lays out factual evidence of privacy abuses by the major online corporate monopolies, some from the beginning of their creation. From day one, Google was designed to follow users’ online movements and collect data. With this came the tech boom that led to the rise of Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. These companies used data mining, like Google, to surveillance unsuspecting individuals who created accounts. They were basically giant computers made to watch our every move, despite hosting some privacy functions for users.
Hawley writes about a whistleblower from Facebook who reported that the social media site was not only working to spy on its users but even conducted experiments on them to see if they could control individuals’ moods by manipulating what was shown on their feeds.
These experiments dated back to 2012, and concluded that Facebook did possess the ability to alter moods. The company continued to perform these kinds of experiments without the consent of those utilizing their platform.
The Tyranny of Big Tech goes on to explore concerns about social media and other tech giants’ role in making their platforms as addictive as possible. Social media itself was “enhanced” and “improved” over the years, but these tweaks in the systems have been especially designed to keep users checking their devices as often as possible to keep them engaged online for maximum periods of time. YouTube’s autoplay function, Facebook’s tagging system for photos, notifications, likes, and so on are all designed to be as addictive as possible.
A direct decline in attention spans has been measured not only in adults, but especially children. With schools moving from paper and pencils to laptops, concerns over screen time and the role big tech plays in the rise of teen depression, suicide, and sleep deprivation is highly alarming. Hawley discusses this as a concerned father who recognizes the need to limit the screen time in his household.
The main points in this book all circle around the issues of corporate monopolies -- which have intruded on individual liberties.
The problem lies in the fact that so many people cannot, or will not, challenge these companies. Officials have allowed these corporate giants to use the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against the Department of Justice to further their own agenda of elitism. Big tech and big government are highly connected and have led manipulation of individuals and information to normalize cancel culture and other political attacks on anyone who speaks up or speaks out.
Josh Hawley offers a list of actions that can be taken to break up big tech which allow our systems to serve us instead of making us bow down to them. First and foremost, how individuals and families consider tech and utilize it is at the heart of taking on big tech. Neighborhood and community efforts to re-engage people in real life activities with real life connections can also allow us to balance the tyranny wrought by big tech.
Going further, Hawley suggests revisions to the infamous Section 230 which protects these tech giants. If revised, redefining social media platforms as publishers will hold them accountable for censoring factual information and political bias. There is also suggestion to end the FTC -- which has little to no regulation and is easily corrupted -- and give oversight of anti-trust laws to the Department of Justice.
All in all, The Tyranny of Big Tech goes through the complex history of big tech and corporate liberalism -- which is highly tied to the political issues of today. It is a crucial resource in today’s fight for freedom and liberty over elitism and control.
Jessica is a homeschooling mother of four, author of The Golden Rule, Walk Your Path, and The Magic of Nature, and her work has been featured by The New American, The Epoch Times, Evie Magazine, American Thinker, and many more.
Hawley described increasingly concentrated power over the flow of information in the hands of companies like Facebook and Google as a threat to all news media.
“The irony here is that Big Tech is also a threat to the establishment media in that Big Tech is about to control them, too,” he concluded. “It’s really a deal with the devil that the establishment media is making.”
A flood of money from the Facebook founder
gave Dems an unfair and illegal advantage.
Tue Dec 22, 2020
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife helped buy the presidency for the increasingly frail and feeble former Vice President Joe Biden by improperly influencing election officials as they strategically flooded left-wing activist groups with more than $400 million during the 2020 election cycle.
Those groups, in turn, gave huge grants to election administrators in order to create “a two-tiered election system that treated voters differently depending on whether they lived in Democrat or Republican strongholds,” Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm focused on religious freedom, wrote in a new report.
Part of the lesson here is that not all privatization is good. Some things need to be done by government alone.
“This privatization of elections undermines the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election plans to be submitted to federal officials and approved and requires respect for equal protection by making all resources available equally to all voters,” according to Kline.
And this illicit collusion between pro-Biden funders like Zuckerberg and government officials that outsourced election administration to the activist Left helped Democrats prevail in battleground states. It may end up installing a puppet of the Communist Chinese in the White House in the terminal stage of the rolling coup attempt against President Donald Trump that began before he was inaugurated.
This year there was “an unprecedented and coordinated public-private partnership to improperly influence” the election in swing states, which “effectively placed government’s thumb on the scale to help these private interests achieve their objectives and to benefit” Barack Obama’s former vice president, according to Kline, a former attorney general of Kansas.
Biden, an underachieving, sleazy career politician from Delaware with no notable achievements despite a half century in office, has claimed victory and the transition process is underway even though President Trump continues to contest the election. Trump’s lawyers filed a new appeal with the Supreme Court Dec. 20 in hopes of reversing the Democrat-dominated Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings that they say unconstitutionally modified the state’s voting-by-mail laws, opening the door to massive election fraud.
Election experts have long said that mail-in voting is fraught with problems because it gives wrongdoers greater opportunities for fraud compared to in-person balloting.
The bipartisan U.S. Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, determined in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
“The consensus among people who study fraud carefully is that voting by mail is a much more fertile area for fraud than voting in person,” Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in 2018.
Pennsylvania’s official 20 presidential electors voted for the Biden-Harris ticket Dec. 14 while a completing slate of Republican electors voted for the Trump-Pence ticket. The Democrat electors in Pennsylvania and other contested states may be challenged in Congress on Jan. 6 when the electoral votes are officially tabulated.
Kline’s report comes as presidential advisor Peter Navarro released his own 36-page report detailing voting irregularities.
“The observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states [i.e. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin] that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to ‘stuff the ballot box’ and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket,” Navarro said during a Dec. 18 conference call with reporters.
According to the Amistad Project’s report, Zuckerberg and his wife made $419.5 million in donations to nonprofits this election cycle –“Zuckerbucks,” as some have called the money— $350 million of which went to the “Safe Elections” Project of the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL). The other $69.5 million went to the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Contrary both to federal law and state legislature-endorsed election plans, Zuckerberg’s money “dictated city and county election management,” Kline wrote in the report’s executive summary.
In addition, “executive officials in swing states facilitated, through unique and novel contracts, the sharing of private and sensitive information about citizens within those states with private interests, some [of] whom actively promote leftist candidates and agendas.”
This sharing of data “allowed direct access to data of unique political value to leftist causes, and created new vulnerabilities for digital manipulation of state electronic poll books and counting systems and machines.”
The Amistad Project, which began investigating the digital vulnerabilities of state election systems in spring 2019, learned that state and local elections officials did not preserve the legal right to access computer logs on the machines counting ballots.
“The first step to engage any computer forensic examination is to gain access to machine logs, yet scores of election officials failed to maintain the right to even review such information, much less establish a method for bipartisan review. In effect, America purchased a complex ballot box (computer) into which its votes would be deposited, but didn’t have the right to open the box and review the count.”
As the COVID-19 crisis worsened in March 2020, more and more lawsuits were filed by left-wing organizations aimed at weakening laws designed to protect the integrity of absentee ballots, the report noted.
Kline is correct.
Democrats aiming to make mail-in balloting mandatory for all Americans in the 2020 election attacked electoral integrity laws in well over a dozen in the courts in an attempt to overturn restrictions on voting-by-mail.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told MSNBC May 20 that going forward it would be called “voting at home,” after Democrats discovered that the idea of “voting-by-mail” didn’t excite actual voters. Voting in person is “a health issue” in the era of the pandemic, she said.
Democrats and other voting-by-mail advocates claimed voters shouldn’t have to risk their physical well-being to vote. Republicans countered that mail-in voting should not be expanded because it is so susceptible to fraud and that Democrats were using the pandemic as an excuse to rig the election.
The attorney leading the legal onslaught against fair elections was Marc Elias of the high-powered Democratic law firm Perkins Coie. Elias has a long history of successfully fighting electoral integrity policies in court, eliminating or weakening signature-matching requirements and ballot-receipt deadlines.
Elias is also an important figure in the “Russiagate” conspiracy, which aimed to overturn the result of the 2016 presidential election. A lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election cycle, Elias hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against then-candidate Trump. That research effort culminated in the laughable, thoroughly discredited 35-page dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele that purported to tie Trump to the Russian government.
While the leftist litigation was ripping electoral safeguards to shreds, battleground state governors began issuing emergency executive orders restricting in-person voting, which has many anti-fraud safeguards, while putting state resources into promoting high-risk, fraud-prone voting-by-mail.
“[T]his coordinated assault on in-person voting generally favored Democrat Party voters who preferred to vote in advance, while placing Republicans, who preferred to vote in person, at a disadvantage,” Kline stated in the report.
Combined, these actions helped to create “a two-tier election system favoring one demographic while disadvantaging another demographic.”
Infused with hundreds of millions of Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, “a previously sleepy 501(c)(3) organization … whose previous annual revenues never exceeded $1.2 million,” suddenly began asking Democratic Party strongholds to seek strings-attached grants that imposed strict conditions on the way recipient jurisdictions ran their elections.
CTCL gave $100,000 to Racine, Wisconsin, in May of this year, and asked its mayor to recruit four other cities (Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, and Milwaukee) to develop a joint grant request. The bloc of cities submitted a “Wisconsin Safe Election Plan” on June 15 to CTCL and, in turn, got $6.3 million from the nonprofit to implement the plan.
The plan treated state election integrity laws “as obstacles and nuisances to be ignored or circumvented,” as CTCL “retained the right, in the grant document, to, in its sole discretion, order all funds returned if the grantee cities did not conduct the election consistent with CTCL dictates.”
In effect, CTCL managed the election in the five affected Wisconsin cities.
The report stated that the CTCL-engineered plan also went around voter ID requirements for absentee ballots by defining all voters as “indefinitely confined” due to COVID-19, and later, after criticism from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, by directing election clerks not to question such claims.
The plan also ushered in the use of drop boxes for ballot collection, a move that disrupted the chain of custody of the ballot, and consolidated counting centers, “justifying the flow of hundreds of thousands of ballots to one location and the marginalization of Republican poll watchers such that bipartisan participation in the management, handling, and counting of the ballots was compromised.”
Electoral integrity watchdogs got wise to CTCL’s pro-Biden game early on.
A group of Wisconsin voters filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Election Commission against the group, claiming that election-assistance grants it gave to Democrat-dominated cities violated state law.
The complainant, Wisconsin Voter Alliance, based in Suamico, Wisconsin, claimed in the legal complaint that CTCL grants violated state law prohibiting the provision of monies to election officials to induce persons to vote or influence an election outcome.
Zuckerberg’s saturation-bombing of CTCL with money allowed the group to hand out so much cash that Democratic strongholds spent around $47 per voter, compared to $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican areas of Wisconsin, according to Kline.
Zuckerberg-underwritten CTCL grants also found their way to election officials in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.
CTCL grants in Pennsylvania were used to pay election judges in Philadelphia and other election officials. CTCL directed Philadelphia to increase its polling locations and to use drop boxes and eventually mobile pick-up units.
Zuckerbucks allowed Philadelphia to “cure” improperly completed absentee ballots in a manner not provided for in Republican-leaning areas of the state, the report stated.
For example, in Democrat-dominated Delaware County, Pennsylvania, one drop box was placed every four square miles and for every 4,000 voters. In the 59 counties Trump won in 2016, there was one drop box for every 1,100 square miles and every 72,000 voters.
“Government encouraging a targeted demographic to turn out the vote is the opposite side of the same coin as government targeting a demographic to suppress the vote,” Kline wrote.
“This two-tiered election system allowed voters in Democrat strongholds to stroll down the street to vote while voters in Republican strongholds had to go on the equivalent of a ‘where’s Waldo’ hunt.”
“These irregularities existed wherever Zuckerberg’s money was granted to local election officials. In effect, Mark Zuckerberg was invited into the counting room, and the American people were kicked out.”
If Biden ends up being sworn in Jan. 20, take a wild guess who will be receiving a presidential Medal of Freedom.
Big Tech, Koch Network Cheer Biden’s Amnesty to Flood U.S. Labor Market
Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’
network of donor class organizations are cheering
on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would
pack the United States labor market with more
foreign visa workers for business to hire over
American graduates and professionals.
This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless.
Among other things, the plan would:
· Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship
· Provide $4 billion in foreign aid to Central America
· Expand the U.S. labor market with more foreign visa workers
· Expedite green cards for foreign relatives, otherwise known as “chain migration”
· Potentially add 52 million foreign-born residents to the U.S. population
· Eliminate per-country caps, ensuring India monopolizes employment green cards
· Increase the Diversity Visa Lottery program where visas are given out randomly
· Provide green cards to foreign students who graduate in advanced STEM fields
· Bring already deported illegal aliens back to the U.S. to provide them amnesty
For Amazon, millions of newly legalized illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and chain migrants who would be added to the U.S. labor market as a result of the plan are a boon to multinational corporations’ profits.
“Today’s immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient,” Amazon officials wrote in a statement. “We look forward working [with] the administration and Congress to advance these proposed solutions.”
Today's immigration reform bill marks an important step in reducing the green card backlog, creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers & making our immigration system more efficient. We look forward working w/ the administration & Congress to advance these proposed solutions.
— Amazon Public Policy (@amazon_policy) February 18, 2021
Specifically, aside from providing Amazon with more foreign visa workers to hire, the plan includes a green card giveaway that would create a green card system where only H-1B foreign visa workers are able to obtain employment-based visas by creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals.
The process would reward outsourcing firms and tech corporations for the decades of outsourcing American jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers.
Executives with the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded organization, also praised the Biden amnesty plan as “an important first step” to securing the green card giveaway for corporations that they have also long lobbied for.
“There is broad support for proposals like a permanent solution for Dreamers, workforce visa reform, removing per-country caps, efficient border security measures and much more,” Daniel Garza with the Libre Initiative wrote in a statement:
Lawmakers should seize the opportunity and demonstrate that partisan gridlock will not keep the American public waiting another 30 years for congress to enact sensible, permanent solutions. We look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure that we can get nonpartisan, sensible solutions past both chambers and enacted into law.
Todd Schulte with FWD.us, a group that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created to lobby on behalf of tech corporations, called the amnesty plan a “critical moment for immigration policy” and a “substantial step forward.”
“Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform a long-failed and too easily weaponized immigration system,” Schulte wrote in a statement. “The time is now and we will seize this moment.”
Despite the business lobby’s insistence that there is a labor shortage, millions of Americans are out of work today and hundreds of thousands of U.S. graduates enter the labor market every year looking for white-collar professional jobs with competitive pay and good benefits.
Already, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants every year. Another 1.4 million foreign visa workers are brought in annually to take American jobs, many in white-collar professions. The latest data reveals that nearly 6-in-10 workers in Silicon Valley, California — the tech industry’s hub — are foreign-born.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Biden's open border advocate Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Can Josh Hawley Break the Internet?
REVIEW: ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’
Santi Ruiz • May 16, 2021 4:58 amThe Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley’s excoriation of corporate power, created a media firestorm before it even came out. The original publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped the book amid the January 6 riots and the Missouri Republican’s insistence on contesting the 2020 election results. Now snatched up by conservative publisher Regnery, it’s selling well—the latest example of cancel culture’s Streisand effect.
In form and structure, Tyranny mirrors a recent book on the same topic by Hawley’s Antitrust Committee colleague and chairwoman, Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar. Antitrust (reviewed in these pages), also tried to frame vigorous antitrust as recovering an American tradition shared by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Teddy Roosevelt, among others.
The two books also share a few political prescriptions. Both senators critique the "Chicago School" of antitrust theory, which takes a friendly view of most mergers. Both, in their own ways, emphasize the dangers of corporate size in itself, even before they address specific harms caused by large companies.
But they differ in whom exactly they want to target. While Klobuchar is a critic of corporate power generally, Hawley knows exactly whom he wants to go after: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google (Twitter, though much smaller, comes in for some heat as well). The book’s greatest strength is also its weakness: Hawley genuinely thinks these companies cause more harm than good and doesn’t shy away from saying so. Tyranny doesn’t vacillate, but it also comes off at times as shortsighted, unwilling to flesh out an approach to big tech companies that might also implicate other nefarious corporate actors.
Hawley’s "corporate barons" are the inheritors of the Gilded Age robber barons, except these corporate barons don’t even create real physical things. "[T]oday’s tech oligarchs wield immense power, thanks to a combination of government aid and monopoly; like the barons, they are utterly convinced of their own righteousness and their right to govern America."
The book’s main targets are the attention economy these oligarchs created and their censorious behavior. In Hawley’s reading of the big tech economic model, users are "sources of information to be mined" for as long as possible. As a result of this shift, we increasingly see a new hierarchy of jobs, with the digital world of content creation reigning over the real-world labors of the "Jeffersonian middle class." Hawley suggests that this world of "modern horrors" has been foisted on American citizens, who otherwise wouldn’t choose constant invasions of their privacy.
For Hawley, this paradigm is fundamentally dangerous to a republican mode of governance, both because it turns citizens into consumptive drones and because it allows tech to monopolize the flow of information. Jon Askonas points out that Hawley’s targets are disseminators of information, rather than companies like Microsoft, which have tremendous market power in other domains. Hawley is less concerned with unaccountable corporations generally, and more concerned with "corporate liberalism," specifically the ideological valence of the platforms that censor speech.
It’s a book short on trade-offs. Hawley correctly brings up the shocking censorship of political dissents Facebook engages in, but many observers believe his proposed solution (Section 230 reform) would mean a massive spike in just this kind of censorship. The antitrust arguments in Tyranny are also rather confusing to follow, as Hawley both criticizes the dangers of the attention economy and complains that monopolies make it harder for competitors to thrive in the same morally questionable businesses.
The policy prescriptions he outlines vary from reasonable to misguided. Hawley believes our current standard for "market power" in antitrust law is too limited: He’s appalled that the law doesn’t look closer at Facebook’s 83 percent share of consumers’ time spent on social media, for instance. At other points, he lambasts platform features like autoplay or sorting by relevance, which plenty of social media users find valuable.
Perhaps Hawley’s most aggressive proposal is to eliminate Section 230 protections for any company that engages in behavioral advertising (that is, all of them). According to Hawley, "behavioral ads drive many of tech platforms’ worst pathologies—the surveillance, the addiction race, the data pilfering." The move would break big tech platforms completely, and Hawley suggests that outcome wouldn’t be so bad.
In the most intriguing passages, Hawley suggests a kind of alternate history for tech, in which different legal principles at the dawn of the internet age could have created a decentralized internet, free of coercion or censorship. But this slim volume doesn’t discuss the flowering of decentralized social media or internet applications happening now—one wonders what the senator has to say about Discord, Bluesky, or cryptocurrency.
Tyranny lays out a program that would cut off big tech companies at the knees. But whether Americans care enough about targeted advertising, censorship, and the perils of the attention economy to endorse this program is another question. If Hawley is right, and we have been turned from citizens to consumers and inputs into the big data machine, it may be too late for his suite of solutions.
The Tyranny of Big Tech
by Josh Hawley
Regnery, 200 pp., $29.99
Poll: Almost Two-Thirds of Americans Say Social Media Is Ripping Country Apart
According to a recent NBC News poll, the majority of Americans say that they use social media at least once a day and also believe that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are dividing the nation rather than bringing it together. 77 percent of conservatives believe social media platforms are dividing the country.
NBC News reports that a recent national NBC News poll found that the majority of Americans admit that they use social media at least once a day and also believe that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are doing more to divide the country rather than unite it.
66 percent o adults say they use social media at least once a day, versus 33 percent who say that they don’t. These numbers are essentially the same as NBC poll figures from both 2018 and 2019.
64 percent of Americans reportedly think that social media platforms do more to divide the nation than unite it. This includes majorities of Republicans (77 percent), independents (65 percent), and Democrats (54 percent). The poll also reported that the majority of whites (70 percent), Latinos (56 percent), young adults (61 percent), and seniors (71 percent) all believe that social media is dividing the nation.
In comparison, only 27 percent of all adults believe that the platforms work to unite Americans. NBC notes that Black respondents are the one demographic split on the question, with 42 percent saying it’s more divisive and 40 percent saying it’s more unifying.
When the same questions were asked in a poll in March 2019, 57 percent of respondents said that social media platforms do more to divide Americans, while 35 percent said they do more to unite citizens.
Among daily social media users, 49 percent said that social media platforms improve their lives while 37 percent say that they make their lives worse. Democrats, women, and college graduates are more likely to say that social media improves their lives while Republicans, men, and those without college degrees are more likely to disagree.
The poll also finds that a majority of parents, 54 percent, say that the time their children have spent on computer screens, phones, and TVs has increased during the pandemic. 38 percent of parents say the amount of screen time for their children has stayed the same while 4 percent say it has declined.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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