Getty Images/iStockOver the past two decades, as Big Tech has boomed, news organizations have been going bust. Between 2004 and 2019, one in every four U.S. newspapers shut down, and almost all the rest cut staff, for a total of 36,000 jobs lost between 2008 and 2019 alone. Local newspapers have been particularly devastated, making it ever more difficult for people to know what is happening in their communities.
Many factors contributed to this economic collapse, but none more so than the cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press—and, by extension, to democracy—is especially pernicious. The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies. As a result of its many roles in degrading our democracy, it faces mounting scrutiny by politicians and regulators.
Facebook has responded to the negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience. Less well known, and potentially far more dangerous, is a secretive, multimillion-dollar-a-year payout scheme aimed at the most influential news outlets in America. Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019.
Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.”
Facebook has responded to negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience.For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.”
There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.
And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook.
But these three points are beyond dispute.
First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. In the pre-internet days, independent newspapers wouldn’t have considered accepting gifts or sweetheart deals from entities they covered, under any circumstance. The Washington Post under the editor Leonard Downie Jr., for instance, wouldn’t even accept grants from nonprofits to underwrite reporting projects, for fear of losing the appearance of independence. Facebook, which took in $86 billion in revenue last year, is a hugely controversial behemoth having profound, highly newsworthy, and negative effects on society. Accepting money from them creates a conflict of interest.
Even for trusted news organizations whose audiences believe they can’t be bought outright, “it might come across as hypocrisy to heavily criticize an industry while also collaborating with them,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Agreeing to keep the terms of the deal confidential is also a mistake, Nielsen told me. “This sort of opacity I don’t think builds trust.”
Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. Journalists, critics, and congressional investigators have amply documented how Facebook has become a vector of disinformation and hate speech that routinely invades our privacy and undermines our democracy. For The New York Times and other pillars of American journalism to effectively partner with Facebook creates the impression that Facebook is a normal, legitimate business rather than a monopolistic rogue corporation.
Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. One such effort would allow the industry to bargain collectively with Facebook and other tech giants by withholding content from the platforms unless they received a fair price for it. But for that to work, small newsrooms would need the biggest and most influential companies to sign on. With those organizations receiving millions of dollars from Facebook through their own side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.
If Facebook’s intent were to save American journalism, it would be making generous offers to smaller, local news organizations that do original reporting, Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told me. By contrast, Facebook News “doesn’t really help anyone in the industry except for the small select group of outlets that get paid,” he said. “These efforts are all flavored with a strong dose of crisis communication and regulation avoidance.”
If any major figure in the American media was going to say no to Mark Zuckerberg, it was Mark Thompson.
For most of his eight-year tenure as chief executive officer of the New York Times Company, Thompson was one of the industry’s most thoughtful, eloquent, and persuasive critics of Facebook and the danger it presents to journalism’s business models and essential role in a democracy.
“It makes my blood run cold, the idea of Facebook as a publisher,” he said at a June 2018 event convened by the Open Markets Institute. At a panel sponsored by the Tow Center later that month, he described that same affect when Zuckerberg “starts talking about how he thinks about community, and about what we trust.” Zuckerberg, he said, has a “terrifyingly naive perspective on news.”
During the OMI event, Thompson warned darkly about the “sinister” prospect “that Facebook’s catalog of missteps with data and extreme and hateful content” will lead it to try to “set itself up as the digital world’s editor in chief, prioritizing and presumably downgrading and rejecting content on a survey- and data-driven assessment of whether the provider of the content is ‘broadly trusted’ or not.”
In an exclusive interview, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year in payouts from Facebook—“very much so.”Here was actual humility from the CEO of the paper of record: “Democracy depends in part on unbounded competition between different journalistic perspectives and the clash of different judgments and opinions,” he said. “History suggests that mainstream news organizations frequently get it right, but also that, not infrequently, it is the outliers who should be listened to.”
And he knew what needed to be done. An essential preliminary step was for Facebook and others to “engage with the collective industry bodies of the news business to arrive at shared principles both on the presentation and choice of news content, and on its monetization.” He called for “consistency and comparability in the treatment of news providers.”
This was not the language of shakedown. It was an impassioned and impressive philosophical argument about the survival of news—and democracy.
But then, all of a sudden, The New York Times and Facebook were making deals together. In October 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News, with The New York Times as a marquee paid partner, getting prime placement in a new vertical designated for “trusted” news sources.
What changed for Thompson between June 2018 and October 2019, such that the idea of Facebook picking which “trusted” news sources to pay went from sinister to “Sign here”?
“We always reserved our rights to do what we needed to do for our own business and to continue to fund our journalism in the interim,” Thompson insisted in a phone interview in March. “I’m a sort of pragmatist,” he said. “I don’t really see this as a conflict of interest or an issue of principle, it’s the real world.” He rejected the depiction of the payments as a gift or a payoff. “As far as I’m concerned, we were paid by a platform for access to our content.” Facebook, of course, does not pay The New York Times for access to its content when it is shared on regular newsfeeds.
And Thompson said that while he still thinks it would be sinister for Facebook to be making its own editorial decisions on a story-by-story basis, “Facebook making it easier for people to identify The New York Times and making it easier to access The New York Times is a good thing.”
What about his devotion to collective rather than individual action? It remains—in theory. “As it happens, I’m still very much in favor of broader agreements,” he told me. “Ideally,” he continued, such payments would be “not just available . . . to the handful of big players but broadly, in particular to local and regional journalism.”
So taking the deal wasn’t a betrayal of his principles, Thompson insisted. “I still fundamentally believe everything I said.” With any collective agreement years away at best, he said, “I don’t accept that our reaching it made it harder for the other publishers to get it—on the contrary . . . I don’t think you’ve got any evidence that a refusal to engage . . . would have helped them at all.” It actually sets a good precedent, he suggested. “It’s brilliant to have got a big digital platform to pay for the use of our content.”
But organizations that are favored by Facebook will obviously have different incentives going forward than those that are not. Unfavored outlets, if begging doesn’t work, may want to play hardball with Facebook to get their due—while the Timesand others will inevitably have qualms before blowing a hole in their budgets.
The Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha declined to address a long list of questions about the specifics of the relationship with Facebook, responding instead with general comments. “Quality journalism is expensive to produce and we believe quality publishers should be fairly compensated for creating valuable journalism,” she wrote in an email. The Times “does not disclose licensing and advertising terms,” she wrote, and “our licensing agreement with Facebook has no impact on our newsroom.”
Once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet.Thompson stepped down as CEO in July 2020 and was replaced by his protégé, Meredith Kopit Levien, who may be even more committed to the deal than Thompson was. A few months after she took over, Levien expressed enthusiasm that Facebook had promised to create a space “for a particular level of quality news providers,” to pay the Times “a fair amount,” and to “feed your funnel.”
The Facebook News deal isn’t Facebook’s only, or first, inroad at the Times. The company already had a seat at the table—literally. The publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. installed the Facebook executive Rebecca Van Dyck on his 12-member board of directors in 2015. Van Dyck, who was Facebook’s global head of consumer and brand marketing at the time, now runs marketing for Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality labs.
Indeed, the Facebook News bounty might even be dwarfed by the undisclosed sum that Facebook is pouring into the Times’s new augmented reality efforts. The newsroom’s new “AR Lab,” a collaboration between Facebook and the Times, builds augmented reality filters and camera effects distributed on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.
There are likely even more ties the public doesn’t know about. BuzzFeed News recently discovered that the Times columnist David Brooks had written a pro-Facebook blog post while on salary for a nonprofit partially funded by Facebook and hadn’t disclosed it to his current Times bosses or the readers.
Thompson would have been very much alone among his U.S. peers had he resisted Facebook’s inducements. He was also hardly the most enthusiastic Facebook partner—that would be News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson, who, after years of vituperative attacks on Big Tech, was grinning at Zuckerberg’s side at the Facebook News launch event and announcing a “new dawn” for journalists.
The rollout was undeniably a huge win for Facebook public relations. The Times story was headlined “Facebook Calls Truce With Publishers as It Unveils Facebook News.” What few negative headlines ensued were related to Facebook’s decision to include Breitbart, the far-right website known for spreading white-supremacist disinformation, among its cadre of “trusted” news sources—although, in Breitbart’s case, an unpaid one.
Months later, Joshua Benton, the director of the Neiman Journalism Lab, described the big downside: The Facebook News deal, he wrote, “lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like ‘Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,’ in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.” Facebook isn’t spending the money “because they think News Tab will be profitable,” Benton wrote. “It’s a way to solve a PR and policy problem.” The vaunted new product, he noted, consists of “a new tab buried so deep in Facebook’s interface you need a spelunker’s headlamp to find it.”
To collectively bargain with Facebook, small newsrooms will need the biggest ones to sign on. With those larger organizations receiving millions of dollars from the social media giant through side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.Facebook News only links to approved outlets, while in the actual News Feed, the algorithm spews out non-reputable clickbait based on what’s enticing the people, pages, and groups a user engages with the most. “The most notable thing about Facebook News is that it includes almost none of the stories that do well on the rest of Facebook,” observed the Nieman Journalism Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen.
Facebook is suspiciously evasive about how many people use Facebook News and how much traffic it generates for publishers, refusing to provide any indication of its scale at all. “We don’t have hard numbers,” the Facebook News spokesperson, Mari Melguizo, said when I asked for data on its performance. “It’s definitely grown and continues to grow. It is on an upward trajectory.”
Prior to Facebook News, the company had repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner for news publishers. As Sarah Perez detailed for TechCrunch, the platform established an “Instant Articles” feature in 2015 that “restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on” in exchange for a better user experience. It was a bad bargain, and, as a result, many outlets abandoned the feature. Facebook promoted a “shift to video” in 2016, but inflated its video use metrics and then refused to pay publishers. This prompted layoffs at many companies, including Vox, Vice, and Mic. Shortly before Facebook News launched, Joanne Lipman, a former editor in chief of USA Today, warned her colleagues that they had “been at the beck and call of these behemoths” for too long.
“I think it’s a dangerous situation for news organizations to count on anything when it comes to Facebook,” the Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy says. To Kennedy, Facebook lost any pretense of morality when, having tweaked its algorithms after the November 2020 election to favor authoritative news sources in the News Feed, it switched back—presumably to boost engagement, to placate right-wing publishers, or both. “You pull all this together, and Facebook is just the worst possible partner,” Kennedy says.
The world watched an extraordinary exercise of Facebook’s massive power in February when it stymied an Australian government attempt to force it to pay to link to news. First, Facebook temporarily banned Australian news sites from its platform. Then it did an end run around the regulators by agreeing to arrange multimillion-dollar deals with major news providers—on its terms, not the government’s. Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, described it as “an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to.” In Australia, the biggest recipient by far of Facebook’s largesse will be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns most of the country’s newspapers. News Corp also heavily lobbied for the new legislation. Facebook didn’t pay the country’s smaller outlets.
“In the end, Google & Facebook have a big bucket of baksheesh that will go to old proprietors and their shareholders,” Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, tweeted in February.
As Facebook News continued to roll out across the globe in 2020 and 2021, someone did finally tell Facebook no. The German media giant Axel Springer rejected Facebook’s offer, describing it as both unseemly and insufficiently lucrative: “We consider the efforts of several platforms to become news brands themselves while at the same time compensating some publishers with inappropriately low remuneration for their content as problematic,” a spokesperson said. The company is now holding out for the passage of new copyright laws in Europe that it hopes will create revenue-sharing agreements “in which all publishers can transparently participate and receive reasonable compensation.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Facebook’s need for allies in the press has taken on a particular urgency. In October 2020, a House judiciary subcommittee released a bold, agenda-setting report, alleging wide-ranging antitrust violations by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general, as well as the attorneys general for D.C. and Guam, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.
Congress is currently holding hearings on the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021, which would give news organizations of all shapes and sizes the ability to negotiate collectively with the big platforms. At a March 12 hearing, News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern noted that the larger media companies already have leverage with Facebook and others. “The ones most in need of collective action are small and community publishers, including most particularly publishers of color, who are suffering deeply in this broken marketplace for real quality journalism,” he said.
HD Media, which owns several West Virginia newspapers, filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook in January, seeking damages from the duopoly. The suit charges that Google’s monopolistic control of digital advertising, along with a secret deal with Facebook not to compete against it, had strangled their source of revenue.
In the long run, reformers say, it will be necessary to break up the giant platforms, end their stranglehold on advertising dollars, and ban algorithms that incite outrage or even violence. In the nearer term, however, some observers support the idea of an independent journalistic fund, financed by Big Tech but operating at arm’s length, that could reward news organizations according to the resources they put into their reporting and the value they contribute to their communities.
Some sort of trusted intermediary or collective agreement seems necessary, because it’s hard to see direct handouts as anything more than a corrupt stopgap measure—especially when they’re mostly given to the news organizations that need the money the least. As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”
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A flood of money from the Facebook founder gave Dems an unfair and illegal advantage.
Tue Dec 22, 2020
Matthew Vadum
32
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
Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
JOHN BINDER
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.
Tech Workers Flee San Francisco
ALANA MASTRANGELO
Employees of tech companies in San Francisco, California, can’t leave the city fast enough, fleeing for the potential tech hubs of tomorrow such as Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida. One former San Francisco exec said: “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been fielding inquiries from top executives in the tech world, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a report by NBC News.
The report added that the mayor has also met with former Google Chairman and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt, and the chairman of Palantir, Peter Thiel, among others.
“There is absolutely no doubt that a big part of the reason why they are moving is that they feel that there is an inhospitable environment for regulation and taxation,” said Suarez.
Miami is not the only city experiencing this type of migration, as tech employees from San Francisco are fleeing to other states offering them better opportunities as well.
Tech workers living in San Francisco had once believed that the high rent, high taxes, long commute to work, and rude neighbors were worth it if they could live in “the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world,” reported SFGATE.
But now, in the wake of the pandemic, tech workers can’t flee the city fast enough, as spending months working remotely in other towns has shown them that the quality of life can be higher elsewhere.
“Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school,” noted SFGATE.
And so they fled to more affordable places, like Georgia, and states with no income taxes, like Texas and Florida. The report added that the number one choice of relocation for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas.
John Gardner, the founder and CEO of the remote personal training startup Kickoff — who fled San Francisco for Miami Beach — told SFGATE that he can’t help but wonder, “what else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
As for Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, the tech worker said that he and his wife moved into a $1.3 million house that he “only saw on video for 20 minutes.”
“It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money,” added Rothermel.
Justin Kan, who co-founded Twitch, tweeted to his followers in August last year, asking them where he should move.
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” asked Kan.
We're selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?
— Justin Kan (@justinkan) August 17, 2020
“Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society,” responded Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir.
Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) August 17, 2020
“You start to feel stupid,” said Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup, of living in San Francisco. “I can understand the 1% rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
Boydas and his family ended up moving to Austin, where they were able to buy a five-bedroom home on an acre of land for the same price they were paying for their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, California.
‘We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
Boydas also noted that his bills are lower, too, such as the water bill, trash bill, and the cost of dining out at a restaurant with his family — adding that he didn’t even know that there were no income taxes when he moved.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error — there’s no tax line here,” said Boydas. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.'”
The report added that there are currently 33,000 members in a Facebook group called “Leaving California,” as well as 51,000 members in its sister group, “Life After California.” In the groups, people share photos of moving trucks, and links to property listings in new cities.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” said Terry Gilliam, the founder of both Facebook groups.
Bear Kittay, the co-founder Good Money, echoed those sentiments, and even acknowledged that some people may find themselves relocating to “a place that is more conservative.”
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” said Kittay of San Francisco.
“A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity,” he added. “And maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
HOME TO DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM
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.
THIS IS WHAT SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, NANCY PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWSOM HAVE DONE TO THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE NOW A COLONY OF MEXICO!
FNC’s Carlson: Kamala Harris Is Bringing California-Style Governance to the Country — ‘You Should Pay Attention to That’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/12/24/fncs-carlson-kamala-harris-is-bringing-california-style-governance-to-the-country-you-should-pay-attention-to-that/
JEFF POOR
24 Dec 2020459
11:01
Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned the same leadership that has brought woes to California is coming to Washington, D.C. in the form of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
According to Carlson, California officials were using race tensions as a way to distract from the shortcomings of that governance.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: We make a lot of fun of the State of California on this show, you may have noticed, but we’re not really joking. California matters and not just because it’s our biggest state. What happens there is at some point almost certain to happen where you live.
Find a national trend that didn’t begin in California. There may be some, but there aren’t many. So if you want to know the future, or if you want to prevent it, look west. California is a roadmap for the rest of us and very often warning.
With that in mind, here is the bottom line on California. It’s falling apart.
Over the course of just the last several decades, California has gone from one of the richest places in the world to the poorest state in our country. More than a third of California’s population now hovers around the poverty line.
Even before COVID, over four million Californians were collecting food stamps. More than 150,000 people in California are homeless. They are everywhere. They’re living on the streets, in parks, under overpasses, in tents on the sidewalk.
Here’s Los Angeles just last month.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is getting worse local say with some encampments so big residents call them McMansion Tents. They’re driving away businesses, too; many of which are already struggling financially because of the pandemic.
This comes as the city sees a spike in violence with a 32% increase in shootings since last year. While police say financial stress from the pandemic is largely to blame, some criticize the leaders for once again being unable to control the issue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: California didn’t always look this way, even recently. This is a human tragedy. It wasn’t caused by God or nature. It was caused by the selfishness and the stupidity of bad leaders and their bad policies.
If these leaders were judged by their performance, what they do, no big city politician in the State of California would have a job tonight. They know that, so they are working hard to make certain they’re not judged by those standards — rational standards.
Instead, they inflame racial wounds to try to keep the population distracted and divided, to keep the attention away from them and their failures.
Here, for example, is the shamefully incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, just this summer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: When I talked about killers, I said, our collective — our collective burden here in this society is that we let black men and women die. I pointed at myself, we collectively have a choice of whether we will be those who heal or whether we will continue being the killers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes. Whenever they start talking about collective responsibility, you know what they are really saying is, take the gaze away from me. It’s not my fault.
Garcetti wasn’t more specific when he talked about, we, the killers. It turns out there are killers in his city. They’re not collective. They’re individuals. They’re criminals. And there are a lot of them.
Under Eric Garcetti, crime in Los Angeles has skyrocketed and many innocent people have died as the result of that. But he is not mourning that. He is not giving speeches in their memory or apologizing for the policies he supported that led to their deaths, and neither by the way, is the city’s new head prosecutor, a man called George Gascon.
Gascon was elected with the backing of George Soros. Soros was the single largest donor to his campaign. He wouldn’t be the District Attorney without George Soros. And so George Gascon has, from his very first day in office done the bidding of his backer, Soros.
He has now announced he will be using the pretext of COVID to release still more criminals into the City of Los Angeles. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: Do you have a plan of giving priority in terms of vaccinations in the LA County correctional facilities?
GEORGE GASCON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: I don’t control the vaccination. But the point that we do have is we’re working to you know, expeditiously release as many people as we can, especially those who have been proven to be at high risk, vulnerable people and obviously people that are not a threat to society.
So we are going to try to remove as many people from that confinement. Justice is really about public health and keeping our community safe.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, OK. So there’s the Soros puppet giving us a lecture on what justice means. Justice is not punishing the guilty, keeping the dangerous away from your children, it is not about enforcing laws. No, justice is making certain that criminals get critical government services before you do, before your parents do.
And that right there, that piece of tape and the attitude behind it distills the emerging politics of California, politics that you should be deeply afraid of, because when they come to your town, they’ll wreck your life.
And if we were to put it in one sentence, it’s this: those who contribute the least get the most. Got it? But don’t you dare complain about it, shut up and hate yourself in silence. That’s an order.
Meanwhile, California’s elected leaders divide the spoils. That’s their job: taking what other people built, giving it to themselves and to their supporters. And they divide the spoils, as is now official policy in the State of California in the most divisive, immoral possible way, along lines of color.
Here is Congresswoman Maxine Waters explaining what kind of person Governor Gavin Newsom should pick to replace Kamala Harris in the United States Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): He has a decision that he has to make, and I think that it will be a black woman. I think he understands that, you know, when Kamala Harris leaves, you know, the Senate, that’s only one black woman who was serving, and certainly it would be, you know, kind of, you know, unfair not to have at least another black woman replace her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: This really is the high point of stupidity in this country’s history. Who cares what color your senators are, who cares what gender they are, you want good government, you want wise competent people in charge of the country, but that’s not what you’re getting because those aren’t the criteria.
In the end, you should know the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom appointed a man called Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate. And when he did, no one debated whether Padilla might be a good senator, whether he might improve the schools or lower the cost of housing or brings bring jobs back. Instead, they argued about his race. That was the only thing they cared about.
Here’s the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, who by the way is an utter buffoon, most famous not for improving San Francisco, but for defying her own lockdown orders in order to dine at the French Laundry in Napa.
Here’s that person explain that Padilla is a bad choice, because he is the wrong color.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LONDON BREED (D), SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: When you think about the history of this country, and the challenges that exist for African-Americans, especially African-American women in the Senate, definitely, this is a real, you know, blow to the African-American community, to African-American women, to women in general. It was definitely a surprise.
And it’s an unfortunate situation as we are trying to move this country forward and making sure that black lives truly matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so you have been a terrible mayor, you have hurt the city, which again, you did not build, you didn’t make San Francisco an impressive place that people wanted to move to. You made it worse. So you’ve disqualified yourself from any comment on government ever for the rest of your life. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is, the rest of us who sit by and let people say things like this on television without thinking and saying, whoa, wait a second, color and gender are irrelevant to good government. Thinking that way is poison. We’re not putting up with this garbage anymore.
We’re implicated in the destruction of the country if we sit back and let decisions get made along those lines. It’s such a destructive sideshow.
Meanwhile, the physical reality, the State of California, which is an actual place with tens of millions of actual people, 40 million, our most beautiful state, our most economically important state falls apart. No one is paying any attention because they are debating the color of the new senator.
But the electrical grid is failing. The power flickers on and off like a third world country. The state’s forests are so mismanaged, they keep catching fire and burning uncontrollably.
Climate change isn’t doing that, bad management is doing that.
Women — we care about women, really? Because women can’t jog in public parks for fear of being attacked by the mentally ill homeless. Does anyone care about them? No.
And for the privilege of all of this, for living in a state that’s literally collapsing around them, the residents of California pay the highest and the most burdensome taxes in the country. So guess what people who can are doing? You know the answer, they are leaving.
California’s largest export used to be advanced aerospace products. That was the economy of Southern California, that and the movies. They’re all gone now. Now, the state’s main export is population.
More than 40% of Bay Area residents tell pollsters they want to leave. Really? And that’s one of the happiest places in the state. And it’s no wonder the average rent price in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco fell 20% in the last year. Why is that? Because no one wants to live there.
The most recent estimates show that California lost more than 135,000 people in the last year. Among those people, by the way, is Kamala Harris. She’s in Washington now, your capital, and she is bringing California-style governance to the rest of us. You should pay attention to that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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