Naked Extortion

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This is the new fund-raising technique of the Progressive-Democratic Party—new for Party, but a much older mechanism for other families. The not very veiled threat comes from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY):

The era of unbridled corruption visited upon the country by the Trump cartel will soon come to an end[.]

Then,

Expected targets for House Democrats include companies that have made large donations to Trump or Trump’s projects and those tied to Trump’s family members or children of the president’s senior aides, including Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick.

The threat made explicit: Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley donor adviser and Progressive-Democratic strategist said it straight out:

His advice to companies who’ve been publicly cozying up to Trump and ignoring Democrats: “Get right with God.”
“You’re going to be totally f—ed next year or you’re going to figure it out this year and you’re going to make amends—and amends are going to be much more costly than they were previously[.]”

Companies are starting to pay the vig:

Meta Platforms and others are writing big checks for [Progressive-]Democrats ahead of the midterms, according to people familiar with the matter, a counterbalance to the tens of millions they gave to the White House ballroom and Republican initiatives.

Companies like Paramount Skydance and Kalshi are accepting Party-designated consiglieri—excuse me, Progressive-Democrat advisors—into their management teams to “help” them run their businesses.

Nice company ya’s got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

Believability

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The Wall Street Journal spent several column inches and a potful of pixels writing about how Michigan’s socialist Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senate, Abdul el-Sayed, is trying to walk back some of the heat he delivered in the primary.

In the last week, the fiery progressive distanced himself from Hasan Piker after the controversial left-wing streamer suggested that American Jews’ support for Israel could put them at risk. El-Sayed in a Fox News interview also cast himself as focused on kitchen-table issues—not the culture war.

The short and sweet of it is this.

El-Sayed spoke from his heart when he was campaigning and hobnobbing with Piker. Now he’s just covering his political behind and tossing his colleague under the bus.

El-Sayed’s words today are not believable.

Money Laundering and Elections

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Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(3) entities get donations to them characterized as tax deductions, and they are prohibited from engaging in any form of political campaign for or against a candidate. Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(4) entities, on the other hand, are allowed to engage in political campaigns, including direct partisan politics.

So far, everything’s jake.

However.

Quite a number of 501(c)(3)s sent all of their donations to 501(c)(4)s explicitly to help fund politicians’ campaigns and to allow their donors’ donations engage in those direct partisan politics. That’s strictly, narrowly legal.

Here are three examples, though, of something more nefarious.

  • Democracy Matters Foundation provided 96% of its 2024 expenditures to its affiliated(!) 501(c)(4), Democracy Matters, some $31.38 million
  • Guarantee Our Votes Project spent just 0.2% of its $13,919,873 on 2024 legal and office expenses; the remainder went to donations like $13.85 million to America Works USA
  • America Votes Education Fund in 2024 gave $20,748,002 to its 501(c)(4) affiliate(!) America Votes. It claimed a token $532 in office expenses and $274 in fundraising expenses that year, and it had no paid employees

Should that sort of thing be legal? It looks like money-laundering to me.

“Sophisticated Free-Market Pricing”

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That’s how a letter-writer in Wednesday’s WSJ Letters section, a university professor who should know better, characterizes campus economies.

Whether the general campus environment fosters particular political or economic attitudes is a legitimate question, but the pricing of campus amenities isn’t evidence of socialism. If anything, it is evidence of sophisticated, free-market pricing.

If it’s a matter of free-market pricing, then since tuition and fees cover all of that extra, colleges and universities have no need of Federal funding or of student loan guarantees.

Research conducted at colleges and universities is a separate matter, and Federal funds, if any, should be carefully controlled. All outcomes from programs partially or fully funded by the government should be strictly in the public arena and beyond the ability of school researchers to patent or otherwise personally profit from them.

Pick One

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In an article regarding Europe’s censors’ efforts to govern and limit American speech, Nathan Harden, RealClearEducation Editor, warned about AI packages embedding invisible and supposedly unremovable watermarks in writing (and eventually in imagery and recordings of speech, also) so that those censors can identify and block speech of which they personally disapprove. In the course of that, the author wrote this about Anthropic AI-generated watermarks in particular.

The marking technology subtly biases words the model picks, in a pattern Anthropic controls via a secret key. The watermark survives ordinary copy and paste, and there is no way to opt out. Anthropic says the mark carries no information that could identify a user and won’t affect the overall meaning of the text.

It isn’t possible to subtly bias words in a text without the overall meaning of that text being so influenced. Surely Anthropic’s managers understand this.

Harden then asked the critical question:

Americans should be asking a more fundamental question: Why is European law dictating how an American company produces words for Americans?

The answer is because [Anthropic’s] managers are all too willing to surrender to Europe’s censors in order preserve their precious presence there and not willing enough, if at all, to spend that energy preserving the freedoms of the nation that nurtured them and provided them the environment in which they grew and now prosper.

How, then, can [Anthropic] or its products be trusted in America or anywhere else?