For Democrats, it’s “do as I say, not as I do.”
Mandela Barnes, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, has made opposition to “dark money” one of the central planks of his campaign, yet his bid has gotten a major push from dark-money networks — to the tune of millions of dollars.
Barnes received the endorsement of the Family Friendly Action PAC, a collective of Democratic political operatives who are injecting $23 million into canvassing efforts — $5 million of which they have said they will spend on Barnes’ effort to unseat Republican Senator Ron Johnson.
According to Politico, the PAC is focused on turning out Democrats and persuading Independent voters and “moderate” women to rally behind endorsed candidates.
“We’re hearing at the doors every day that the economy and high costs are voters’ top priorities,” said Sondra Goldschein, executive director of Family Friendly Action PAC. “We meet voters at the doors to have really important, face-to-face conversations about how the Democrats are fighting to help American families.”
As the Washington Free Beacon notes, most of Family Friendly Action PAC’s money comes from liberal dark-money groups like Sixteen Thirty Fund and America Votes.
All this despite the fact that Barnes has vowed to “stand up to the corrupting influence of dark money.”
In fact, his website decries the status quo in which “wealthy corporations and special interests subvert the will of the voters by spending millions in dark money to influence elections and elected officials.”
Specifically, Family Friendly Action PAC took in $1.4 million from America Votes and $285,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, per FEC records.
During the 2020 election, the Sixteen Thirty Fund spent hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of liberal candidates and policies. America Votes in turn received most of its 2020 cash from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to Politico.
Not only has Barnes not rejected the dark money spent in his favor; it turns out the super PAC’s Wisconsin state director, Brita Olsen, was a consultant working for Barnes in 2019.
And outside groups have opened their wallets to help Barnes before.
As the Free Beacon reports:
On June 15, [Barnes] posted a note on his website saying he needed help getting positive advertising about his personal background out to the pricey “Milwaukee, Madison and the Green Bay media markets.”
Days later, a group called the Courageous Leaders PAC—funded by Barnes donor Karla Jurvetson—poured more than $400,000 into ads promoting the exact message outlined by Barnes, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Barnes’s campaign also hired Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top “dark money” lawyers…. Elias’s firm works for Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm that manages the Sixteen Thirty Fund and similar groups.
The New American has reported extensively on the various dark-money networks and strategies the Left is using to radically transform politics in the United States.
Some of these strategies skirt the line of legality. For example, Hansjörg Wyss, an 86-year-old Swiss billionaire with ties to high-profile left-wing insiders such as George Soros and John Podesta, has reportedly donated tens of millions of dollars to Democratic politicians and liberal causes through his dark-money network of nonprofits, despite being a foreign national — something federal election law explicitly prohibits.
According to a Virginia-based think tank, since 2016, nonprofits connected to Wyss have funneled over $253 million to Democratic candidates and related causes, including voter-registration efforts benefiting the party and pushes to impeach President Donald Trump.
Though he lives in Wyoming, Wyss is neither a U.S. citizen nor a permanent resident. This means he cannot legally spend money on federal political candidates directly or indirectly, as federal law explicitly bars foreign nationals (individuals who are neither citizens nor permanent residents) from injecting money into elections. Wyss, who is worth more than $5 billion, lives in the United States under an E-2 investor visa, per court papers.
George Soros, of course, has continued his involvement in American elections, recently dropping a cool $1 million to help the campaign of Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams through his Democracy PAC II.
Although leftists like to depict themselves as the champions of the working class, the truth is they have major corporate money behind them in order to take advantage of the hopes of the poor and then concentrate greater power in the hands of the elites — at the cost of our freedoms.
