Astroturf: AP Amnesty Story Mostly Quotes Paid Zuckerberg Shills
The Associated Press fell victim to Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of astroturf groups on July 13th when the news service posted an immigration-related article that helpfully quoted a seeming diversity of people.
But a careful inspection shows that nearly all of the quotes came from paid activists in Zuckerberg’s pro-amnesty astroturf empire.
The article by Alan Fram was intended to describe the Democrats’ effort to pass multiple amnesties through the Senate by using the complex “reconciliation” process:
Their goal is to stuff the language into a huge measure this fall financing many of President Joe Biden’s priorities that would be shielded from a Republican Senate filibuster. That bill-killing [filibuster] procedure requires a virtually impossible 60 votes to overcome, but erasing that danger [with reconciliation, and] a Democrat in the White House means they could score an immigration triumph by themselves after years of Republican blockades.
Fram quoted Frank Sharry, the director of America’s Voice (Zuckberg provided him with $370,000 for 2019 and 2020); Ali Noorani, the director of the National Immigration Forum (whom Zuckerberg provided $1.5 million for 2019 and 2020); and Lorella Praeli, a leader in the “We Are Home” coalition that is funded by roughly $20 million in Zuckerberg donations, along with at least $30 million in “dark money” from unknown progressives.
Fram quoted Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which gets funding from Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group of like-minded investors. In 2019, FWD’s education arm provided $15,000 to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
Fram quoted Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) who is backed by FWD.us. For example, In November 2019, FWD.us hosted an event in Chuy’s district:
CHICAGO, IL —The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Family Focus, and FWD.us hosted a DACA renewal clinic on Nov. 16 with volunteer immigration attorneys, policy experts and community advocates. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Illinois Rep. Lisa Hernandez, and Berwyn elected officials also attended …
The clinic took place in Berwyn, Illinois where 52 DACA renewal applications were completed, of which 40 received scholarships funded by FWD.us to cover the renewal fees.
FWD.us’ education arm also provided $30,000 to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which also hosted the event that Garcia attended.
The Fram article also quoted Kerri Talbot, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub group. Her group works with Zuckerberg’s FWD.us to fund and promote polls showing apparent public support for the amnesty bills that would cut Americans’ wages and spike their housing costs. “This is the chance to finally get it done,” Talbot told Fram about the reconciliation push.
Talbot’s Immigration Hub was created by another pro-migration billionaire, Laurene Powell Jobs, and it reflects the west coast Democrats’ support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Fram’s article continued, “Immigration advocates point to polls showing public support for opening the citizenship doorway and studies showing immigration spurs economic growth.” In June, Immigration Hub, America’s Voice, and FWD.us touted a new set of commissioned polls that claim the public supports amnesty. The Zuckerberg-backed polls include skewed questions, such as:
When asked about the best way to handle migrants at the border:
55% say it’s best to “build a functioning immigration system that processes people in a fair, orderly, and humane way”;
Just 45% favor “more border security, more border patrol agents, and crackdowns on illegal immigration.”
Unsurprisingly, Immigration Voice favorably quoted Fram’s article.
The Fram article also quoted the Center for American Progress (CAP), which has taken FWD.us funding related to criminal justice. CAP has long pushed for migration, in part because poor migrants tend to vote for the Democratic Party.
Zuckerberg is not mentioned in Fram’s AP article.
After citing roughly eight pro-migration sources, Fram’s article did quote two people in the immigration debate who have been at odds with Zuckerberg.
The first of the two non-Zuckerberg people was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): “Sanders said in a brief interview late Monday that his budget will include the immigration language ‘if I have anything to say about it.'”
But in 2015, Sanders dismissed a call for easy migration into the United States. “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he told Vox.com.
Zuckerberg’s network is now working with former President George W. Bush and the Koch network to spike their stock market wealth with more immigrant consumers, renters, and workers.
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.
But unlike most migration reporters in the established media, Fram talked to one advocate against the Democrats’ reconciliation plan:
“It would be a harder fight for our side if the administration were actually controlling the border,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations director for NumbersUSA, which favors limiting immigration. “It doesn’t seem like a great way to go into the midterms” for Democrats.
Jenks declined to comment to Breitbart News, saying, “I can tell you on the record that NumbersUSA most certainly does not get as a single dime from Zuckerberg.”
The breadth of groups echoing Zuckerberg’s priorities is a big change from the 2013 amnesty when much of the pro-amnesty funding was distributed by George Soros.
In that 2013 and 2014 fight, pro-amnesty advocates largely conducted a traditional debate featuring TV arguments, paid advertising, Capitol Hill press conferences, rival op-eds, and TV shouting matches.
The push almost succeeded but was ultimately blocked by grassroots opposition. That opposition turned the push into a disaster for Democrats who lost five Senate seats in 2014 — and put Donald Trump on his two-year path to a rendezvous with a GOP-majority Senate and House.
In contrast, the 2021 push is almost entirely conducted behind doors in Congress, the agencies, and the White House, with little or no skeptical coverage from the media despite the massive economic impact of any amnesty on the media’s readers and on their own white-collar employees.
FWD is spending heavily to shape and direct media coverage.
“The big lesson over the last decade is that if you can pick the playing field and go on offense, this is a huge winning issue,” FWD.us president Todd Schulte told his activist groups during a May 26 pitch. One of his deputies, Jess Morales Rocketto, added:
In the fight around immigration and in particular family separation, Twitter and social media have been really, really important. And I think that one of the things we learned is your ability to drive conversation matters a lot — when you’re not driving conversation, people are filling [space] that with their unique sort of story. And when you don’t have people who drive conversation — individuals, organizations, whatever — it’s very very difficult to get in the [media] mix on the day-to-day on issue and keep them there. One of the things we’re most proud of a Families Belong Together is we’ve made it so that family separation is a front page issue whenever it comes up.
So far, no establishment reporter has dared cover the economics of migration or its massive impact on blue-collar and white-collar Americans. However, a growing number of reporters are quietly describing the economic gains for working Americans amid the 2021 shortage of willing workers while carefully not mentioning the supply-and-demand impact of migration.
Zuckerberg has also been funding much political activity in the states. For example, several states have recently passed laws that allow illegal aliens to work in licensed blue-collar jobs, such as plumbing, electrician, or HVAC technician.
Right-of-center business-first groups were stronger in the 2013 and 2014 debates, mostly with funds from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and New York investors.
In 2021, the Koch networks’ array of real estate and Wall Street donors is trying to play a role by working with George W. Bush. But GOP leaders have used the border chaos to fend off that business push, including from Bush, who recently explained that his low-profit “tree farmer” business could only operate because of cheap foreign labor provided by the government.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s money also goes to business-first groups associated with the GOP’s establishment wing. For example, $200,000 went to the business-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation, and $10,0o0 went to the National Foundation for American Policy. Other Zuckerberg donations went to the Cato Institute and the Niskanen Center.
Via FWD.us and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg has also spread the money around to groups with little role in immigration policy. For example, $125,000 went to the very wealthy Southern Poverty Law Center.
Zuckerberg’s money is backed up by the Democrats’ network of dark money groups, such as the Arabella Advisors group, and likely, with funds from George Soros. The secret donors in groups can profit from their pro-migration amnesty because their investments will gain from any inflow of foreign consumers, retailers, and workers.
Mike Bloomberg was active in 2013 and 2014 but is playing a less visible role in the 2021 amnesty push.
Fox News plays much the same role as in 2013, with breathless coverage of the border and minimal coverage of the wealth shift caused by legal and illegal immigration. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Associated Press also ignore the federal government’s policy of inflating the labor supply for the benefit of investors.
That leaves Zuckerberg as the “forward face” of the 2021 debate, said one critic.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. They are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families. Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
Zuckerberg’s Cheap Labor Group Praises Democrats’ Amnesty Plan
Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group of investors is praising Senate Democrats’ proposed budget package which reportedly includes a massive amnesty to pack the United States labor market with newly legalized illegal aliens.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats said they have agreed to a $3.5 trillion budget package that includes provisions to spend billions of American taxpayer dollars on giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who would be immediately legalized and thus allowed to take jobs in the U.S. economy.
The amnesty push comes after a major lobbying effort by FWD.us, which seeks to pack the U.S. labor market with foreign workers to boost profit margins for multinational corporations such as Facebook, to slip the amnesty into a filibuster-proof “reconciliation” maneuver that would only need majority support in the Senate to pass.
“We are pleased to see meaningful efforts to fix our long-failed immigration system including a pathway to citizenship has been included in the Senate budget resolution package and has received support from the White House,” FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement of the Democrats’ amnesty plan:
As bipartisan talks continue, we are encouraged by this dual-track effort to ensure that legalization providing an urgently-needed pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders, farmworkers, and other essential workers passes as soon as possible. This is vital to our response and recovery from COVID-19 and to the long term success of our families, communities, and economy. [Emphasis added]
…
We expect all Members of Congress to use every ounce of their power and leverage all avenues available to pass meaningful reforms this year, including Democrats through reconciliation. This is permissible, it is urgent and it is the right thing to do. Lawmakers must act with urgency to protect immigrant families and strengthen our economy, and finally send this resolution to President Biden’s desk for signature. [Emphasis added]
In 2013, Zuckerberg joined with other billionaire investors to create the FWD.us lobby group as they tried to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty. The bill was blocked by House and Senate Republicans.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) suggested this week that President Joe Biden is on board with slipping an amnesty through Congress via the filibuster-proof reconciliation maneuver:
Are they aware of my interest and my request? Absolutely. And I haven’t been told no. I believe the White House is supportive of both an ambitious infrastructure package, and as substantive immigration reform as you can achieve in any way possible.
Should Democrats try to sneak an amnesty into a budget via reconciliation, it will be up to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to halt the plan on the grounds that the measure is not budget-related but actually alters federal immigration law. MacDonough previously stopped Democrats from increasing the federal minimum wage visa reconciliation.
Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.
Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Big Tech are State Actors
A ‘state actor’ is a private company that either acts on behalf of the government or has other special relationships with the government, which subject it to constitutional restrictions on government, including the First Amendment. Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been state actors since about 2010. They claimed to be neutral, non-discriminating in their political and scientific views and denied any political bias—until about a year ago. Then they reversed the narrative and said that they are private companies that can discriminate against whomever they want.
I can list half a dozen ways in which they are state actors. The pressure on them from Democrat officials, asserted by Trump in his lawsuit, is one of them. Obamanet, or net neutrality, is another one. But most obviously, they became state actors when federal and state government agencies opened accounts on their platforms and started to use them for interaction with the public. By accepting (and luring) multiple government accounts, they became public forums and state actors.
A few days ago, the Supreme Court refused to review the ruling in Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University v. Trump, No. 18-1691 (2d Cir. 2019). In it, the district court ruled, and the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court upheld, that each tweet from a government account opens a public forum, and the government cannot block citizens from participating in it. Most of the legal wrangling was over whether the @realDonaldTrump account was a governmental one for the purposes of the First Amendment. It was despite being hosted on a putatively private platform.
The state actor doctrine expresses the general principle that what the government cannot do under the Constitution directly, it cannot do indirectly, such as by delegating to private companies. If the government delegates some of its activity to a private company, that company becomes the state actor in respect to that activity and is bound by all Constitutional restrictions on the government.
It is the same as if a municipal government rents a property for a town hall from a private company. The private company cannot ban residents it does not like from going to the town hall or retaliate against anybody for saying certain things at that town hall. It is irrelevant whether the agreement between the company and the city specifically prohibits that. It is a state actor.
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, almost all federal agencies opened accounts on Twitter. Some examples: @FBI – Nov 25, 2008; @ODNI, @DeptofDefense, @TheJusticeDept, @FCC, @CDCEmergency – 2009; @FTC – 2010. Only a handful of agencies had such accounts before the 2008 election. By the end of Obama’s second term, almost all government agencies had accounts on Twitter. Twitter users interacted with tweets from many government accounts and discussed them on their own accounts. Thus, all of Twitter became the government’s interactive space – a public forum, participation in which is protected by the First Amendment. Consequently, Twitter became a state actor, prohibited from banning or otherwise discriminating against the users based on their political views. The same logic and conclusions apply to Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn. Consequently, all their terms of services, content policies, and other documents restricting citizens’ rights under the Constitution, are null and void.
The state actors’ status of these platforms, coming from their endorsement and active use by the US and state governments, benefitted them enormously, far beyond the visitors’ traffic to governmental accounts. The public, political parties, and other entities understood the large presence of the US government on the Big Tech platforms as a guarantee of freedom of speech and equal treatment by the platform owners.
Today, it seems normal for government agencies at all levels to have accounts (interactive public spaces) on three proprietary platforms, owned by non-competing and colluding corporate behemoths on their terms, allowing those behemoths to abuse at will citizens interacting with those agencies. This practice of third-world dictatorships was started by the corrupt and radical Obama administration.
We should expect that the federal government does not engage in viewpoint discrimination and that it provides access to itself as broadly as possible. It should not give one newspaper exclusive coverage of its activities. When there are physical limits, such as the size of the press room in the White House, it invites multiple press outlets which transmit the press conference to all the public. But with the Internet, physical limits have disappeared. By 2008, many government agencies had their own websites. They used or could use RSS and other open Internet protocols to provide updates available to any aggregators, from the top TV network to tiny blogs. They could distribute information directly by email to subscribers. Free and low-cost software was available to host web forums, allowing the visitors to interact with the government content, to provide comments, and to express opinions. There was even an open protocol and software to run social media (from identi.ca to Mastodon). The government received no benefit from opening accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. On the contrary, it incurred large expenses in managing these additional communication channels.
Today, some government agencies rely on Twitter as their exclusive emergency communications channel. Twitter can act as a prosecutor, judge, and executioner by blocking a person in a time of emergency.
The only beneficiaries were the social media companies. The Obama administration did not bother to run a tender or an auction when provided with such a valuable concession. It simply selected friends in Silicon Valley and showered them with gifts, tying them to itself. Another enormous gift to them was net neutrality – a free ride on the consumers’ Internet access fees. This explains why the Democrats were so furious at Facebook and Twitter for allowing Trump to win the 2016 election, and why Big Tech was working so hard to undo his victory.
In an article on Jonathan Turley’s blog, entitled Government Agencies Should Reconsider Using Facebook And Twitter and posted on October 15, 2016 (before Trump’s election win), a contributor mentioned anti-conservative censorship by Facebook and Twitter and noticed the loss of privacy by citizens interacting with the government on these platforms. One passage sounded prophetic:
Therein lies the risk that perhaps government agencies as a whole or individual officials will run afoul of a social medium’s content expectations and these entities will effectively suffer filtering or worse blackouts,” and warned against “relegating the citizenry to a future where only a few social media companies control the information.
Photo credit: Anthony Quintano CC BY 2.0 license
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