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Insurrectionists Are Pouring Dark Money into Glenn Youngkin's Campaign

Virginia's campaign finance laws (which place no limits on contributions) are frighteningly allowing backers of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to pour dark money into Virginia's statewide elections this year.  Many who value democracy and can foresee how GOP victories could undo years of progress especially in the area of voting rights and LGBT rights in Virginia.  Indeed, my husband and I have given more monry to Democrat candidates this year than ever before in our lives - tomorrow we will be attending a McAuliffe event and will deliver one of the largest checks ever.   The treat posed by the GOP and Glenn Youngkin's stealth campaign to parade himself as a moderate is truly that severe. Maddeningly, too many Virginian's who do not follow politics or know about the true viciousness of some of the groups Youngkin is alligned with may fall for his lies or fail to vote. Now, as Salon is reporting, financial backers of the January 6th insurrection hope to flip Virginia to the "dark side." Youngkin's ad say he is unhappy with the state of affairs in Virginia, but what he's really talking about is he opposes LGBT rights, easy voting for all citizens, and women having control over their own bodies. On social issues he is in lock step with the extremists at The Family Foundation and Family Research Council, a certified hate group.  Here are highlights from Salon:

A billionaire Trump donor who funded a group that marched on the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is bankrolling a dark-money group boosting Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin's attacks on Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe.

The Republican-aligned Restoration PAC this week launched new ads attacking McAuliffe, who served a previous term as governor, over crime rates. . . .  The PAC has spent $1.767 million funding ads against McAuliffe, making it by far the largest independent expenditure group in the race.

The group is funded almost entirely by Republican mega-donor Richard Uihlein, co-founder of the Wisconsin shipping supply giant Uline. Uihlein contributed $24.5 million to the group in the 2020 election cycle, making up 97% of its funding, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. He put another $1.5 million into the group in May, according to FEC filings.

Uihlein and his wife Liz are among the biggest Republican donors in the country, having given more than $65 million to former President Donald Trump, Republican candidates and conservative groups since 2019. The Uihleins have also contributed $4.3 million over the past five years to the Tea Party Patriots, including $800,000 in October 2020, making them by far the group's biggest donors. The Tea Party Patriots participated in the "March to Save America" rally that preceded the Capitol riot and were one of 11 groups listed as part of the "#StopTheSteal coalition," according to WBEZ. . . . . Tea Party Patriots also contributed to Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who led objections to the certification of Electoral College results in the Senate.

Restoration PAC last month also gave $942,000 to Women Speak Out Virginia — 2021, a PAC affiliated with the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List that launched a $1.4 million campaign to attack McAuliffe on abortion.

Uihlein's foundation also contributed $275,000 to Trump booster Charlie Kirk's Turning Point Action between 2014 and 2016. The group was listed as a participant in the Capitol protest and Kirk took credit for "sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president" in a since-deleted tweet.

Turning Point Action also previously received $50,000 from the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative dark-money group that helped Trump fill federal courts with conservative judges and is pushing to restrict voting.  The group also funds the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), giving it $2.1 million last October and a total of $12.7 million since 2014. RAGA's fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to "march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal" on Jan. 6.

The Judicial Crisis Network has multiple legal aliases it uses for other initiatives, including The Concord Fund and Free to Learn Action. That latter group has launched a $1 million ad campaign focused on "critical race theory" in schools, an issue Youngkin and other conservatives have seized on. The group is spending $1 million attacking McAuliffe for arguing that parents should not dictate school curricula.

Youngkin has tried to walk a fine line on Trump's election lies as he tries to solidify his Republican base without alienating independent and suburban voters in the increasingly blue state. He refused to acknowledge President Biden's election victory while seeking the Republican nomination, doing so only after he had already triumphed over Republican rivals. And while Youngkin has said he would have voted to certify the election results, he is nonetheless calling for an "audit" of voting machines in Virginia (something the state already does) and boosting election conspiracy theorists.

Youngkin, the former CEO of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, is also the primary funder of Virginia Wins, contributing $1 million to back Republican candidates in down-ballot races. The PAC has funneled tens of thousands to candidates who attended the Stop the Steal rally, organized transportation for others to attend the event, defended Capitol rioters or pushed election conspiracy theories, Mother Jones reported on Thursday.

"It's no surprise that some of the most powerful, pro-insurrection dark money forces are rushing to Glenn Youngkin's side in this campaign," Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for the Virginia Democratic Party, said in a statement to Salon. "They are supporting Youngkin because he's all in on their agenda — and they have full confidence that if elected, Glenn will do exactly what Donald Trump says. He belongs nowhere near the governorship."

Many of us in Virginia are very, very afraid and rightly so.

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Bullying, Right Wing Parents Have No Place In Public Education

The Virginia governor's race has shown a spotlight on the GOP's manufactured "parents' rights" movement which, if not blunted, would allow a loud minority to censor public education and erase segments of the population for mention whatsoever.  Naturally, those the Christofascists and white supremacists of the GOP base want to erase are racial minorities, especially blacks, and LGBT individuals. In the preferred world of these bigots, we simply would not exist and our contributions to America's history and society would never be mentioned in public school curriculums.  GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin is running a dishonest ad that takes statements of Democrat Terry McAuliffe out of contest to act as if Mcauliffe wants to silence parents.  Nothing could be further from the truth and McAuliffe merely opposing bullying, racist and extremist minorities for dictating school policies and curriculum.  The ad is a lie, but then Youngkin (and the rest of the GOP statewide slate) is lying about many things, including his ties to hate groups such as The Family Foundation and Family Research Council, the latter of which has a leader with documented ties to white supremacist groups.  The Washington Post slams the ugly elements of the GOP base who are seeking to threaten and intimidate school boards across the country.  Here are editorial highlights (in Texas, some parents frighteningly wanted "both sides" of the Holocaust to be taught):

As Virginia’s governor in 2016, Terry McAuliffe (D) faced the decision of whether to sign into law a bill that would have required schools to notify parents of instructional material with sexually explicit content. “Parents,” we wrote, “should be involved in their children’s education and schools should heed their concerns.” Nonetheless, we urged Mr. McAuliffe to veto the measure. Most school districts have in place policies or practices that take into account the concerns of the community and those of individual parents; the bill would have undermined the ability of local school boards to make decisions, and it targeted notable books by authors of color.

Mr. McAuliffe rightly vetoed the bill, and that decision has surfaced as an issue in his race to reclaim the governorship against Republican Glenn Youngkin. In defending his decision, Mr. McAuliffe misspoke in saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign said the comment, made last month in the second and final debate before the November election, was taken out of context.

Mr. Youngkin has seized on the misstep, putting Virginia front and center in the nation’s increasingly heated debate over what should be taught in schools and who gets to decide. . . . there also are legitimate concerns about some Republicans stoking a “parental rights” movement for political gain, furthering cultural divisions. By their telling, a cabal of school administrators and teachers have sidelined parents from critical decisions including mask wearing, sex education and the teaching of U.S. history.

No question that parents should have a say in the education of their children, but individual parents can’t dictate that schools teach what they want.

Allowing one parent — or a group of parents — to bully, threaten and intimidate school officials into their way of thinking is not what our democracy is about. And it is not what learning should be about. It is chilling that a school administrator in Texas suggested that an opposing view of the Holocaust needed to be taught to comply with the state’s controversial law on curriculum content. Everyone — parents, teachers and school administrators, as well as politicians — needs to focus less on what books are being taught and more on giving students the skills to think critically and form their own judgments.

If not stopped, these right wing elements will next be pushing for creationism to replace hard science and many will be erased from curriculums across the country.  White Christian nationalists should never be allowed to dictate school policies and ban books they dislike from school libraries as is now happening in the Virginia Beach City Public Schools. 

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The GOP Is Losing Military Voters

In the past it was assumed that members of the U,S. military tended to be more conservative than the general population and voted overwhelmingly for Republicans.  The good news is that this state of affairs is changing apparntly in no small part thanks to Donald Trump who according to a piece in The Economist hemmorgaed military voters in 2020.  The reasons for the strong shift to Democrats isn't explained, but in Trump's case, it's possible that military voters did not want a mad man as thier commander-in-chief.  Another possible explanation is that the members of the military are comprised of an increasingly diverse mix racially and in terms of background so that past voting habits are changing accordingly.  One can only hope that the trend away from the GOP continues and accelerates.  Here are article excerpts:

ALLEGATIONS OF FRAUD can seldom be stood up by mere insinuation of fishiness. But with scant evidence, one Republican Party poll-watcher in Detroit fell back on that in 2020. In a notarised statement presented by the Trump campaign, the onlooker noted that most of the military ballots he “saw were straight ticket Democrat or simply had Joe Biden’s name filled in on them”. “I had always been told that military personnel tended to be more conservative, so this stuck out to me as the day went on,” he added. Although military voters and their families do tilt conservative (see chart), there is little evidence that they are a Republican constituency. In fact, analysis by The Economist suggests that Mr Trump performed far worse in 2020 across precincts that map onto military bases than he did four years earlier.

[W]hile today’s soldiers are encouraged to exercise their right to vote, for some, including a number of America’s most distinguished generals, non-partisanship has precluded boots in the ballot box. General George C. Marshall once wrote, “I have never voted, my father was a Democrat, my mother was a Republican, and I am an Episcopalian.”

“There’s a broader narrative that the military is monolithically conservative or Republican, and that just really isn’t the case, or at least is not any more”, says Danielle Lupton, a scholar of civil-military relations at Colgate University in New York. Enlisted soldiers are drawn from, and thus generally reflective of, the American public, although they have greater racial diversity (a constituency that leans Democratic) and far more men (who tend Republican). As voting patterns shift nationwide, so too do they shift among the armed forces.

The Economist’s analysis of precincts that map closely onto military bases found a median swing of nearly eight points towards Joe Biden, compared with a nationwide shift of a little over two points in the same direction. On average, Mr Trump still won these precincts, though his margin shrank by nearly half.

This method is inexact: two-thirds of enlisted service members who vote send in absentee ballots and military bases are often sprawling compounds where spouses, civilian contractors and other support staff reside and vote.

But so too is this finding borne out in the limited available polling of active military personnel. Shortly before the election of 2020, the Military Times and the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University augured an even more extreme swing. Whereas in October 2016 their joint poll showed Mr Trump outpacing Mrs Clinton by 20 points, four years later Mr Biden was ahead of the incumbent by four points.

The Military Times-IVMF polling before the election showed Mr Trump lost ground among both enlisted soldiers and the officer corps, the latter of whom had historically voted disproportionately Republican. Looking ahead to 2024, for Republicans to regain what was lost of the military vote, Mr Feaver speculates the best thing would be “for Trump to shuffle off stage”.

Again, let's hope the trend continues.

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