Tag Archives: morality

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.

Responsibility

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A letter writer to The Moneyist wrote that

…political issues came up, and our daughter-in-law wanted to discuss and debate them with me. I calmly reminded them of our previous agreement [that there would be no political discussions among them].
Since January, our son and his wife have stopped communicating with my wife and me. They have refused to return our phone calls or respond to our texts. We have been told that our daughter-in-law does not wish to have contact with our family.

The letter writer added that we have also tried to respect the boundaries they have established.

First, it’s not just the daughter-in-law who has broken off contact. So has the son, who plainly has gone along with his wife, perhaps actively sides with her for the same reasons she has for refusing contact. It’s not inappropriate for a husband to support his wife over his parents, so there’s nothing to be read into that aspect. Both son and daughter-in-law are affirmatively not wanting further contact with the parent; that’s the boundary they’ve set.

Against that, the letter writer wonders if he and his wife should cut the two out of their will(s). A potential complication is that the letter writer has another son, only mentioned for his existence, so I assume (yes, yes) that this son is on good terms with the letter writer.

My position is this, because I tend to be a bit black and white on such things. The son and daughter-in-law have taken themselves out of the letter writer’s family. The only tie, such as it is, remaining is the accident of birth involving the son. Their removal of themselves—as the letter writer notes, they were not driven out—also took them out of any familial-related connections and obligations.

The parents would be well-served to acknowledge their son’s decision, not impose themselves on him—honor the boundaries they have established—and rewrite their wills (each parent should have his/her own will), and allocate their estate elsewhere. That’ll be hard to do, emotionally, but it’s necessary according to the son’s and his wife’s boundaries. That reallocation might also lead to friction between the son and daughter-in-law and the other son, but that’s among those three; it’s irrelevant to the fact of the two having decided to leave the family altogether.

Hate Speech According to Leftists

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The latest example is provided by the Portland, Oregon, Portland Public Schools school district. The district has banned a mother

from her children’s school for a year because she engaged in sidewalk advocacy against its secret gender curriculum and social transitions of gender-confused students, claiming her “hate speech” violated its harassment policy….

That ban included preventing her from witnessing her son’s graduation from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School. Her daughter remains at risk of the school’s indoctrination program, a program of which the school district is so embarrassed, I surmise, that it felt constrained to keep it hidden away from concerned parents.

Regardless of the district’s apparent embarrassment over its program, or its dishonest desire to keep its treatment of the parents’ children from them, it has made its attitude toward speech very clear with the ban and its claimed reason for it.

Hate speech, according to the district, is any speech that disagrees with its Leftist ideology. Contra the Just the News characterization of the school district’s position, though, this attitude—toward free speech and toward transgender abuse of children—isn’t far-left; it’s increasingly becoming mainstream Left.