Tag: 2022 elections

Tim Ryan Took Money From Opioid Distributor Whose Executives Mocked Addicts as ‘Pillbillies’

On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, likes to tell voters about his work as co-chair of the Congressional Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus and to attack pharmaceutical companies for profiting from “getting so many millions of Americans hooked on opiates.” None of that stopped him from accepting money from a political action committee funded by an opioid distributor whose executives mocked addicts as “pillbillies,” a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance documents found.

The $1,000 donation came from AmerisourceBergen PAC in November 2019. Emails revealed in 2021 during a lawsuit against the company for its alleged role in the opioid crisis showed AmerisourceBergen’s executives expressing broad contempt for poor whites suffering from addiction, which at the time was largely fueled by pharmaceuticals such as OxyContin.

In one exchange, a senior AmerisourceBergen executive circulated a parody song containing references to “hillbilly heroin,” “a bevy of Pillbillies” and a reference to Kentucky as “OxyContinville.” Another email shared between executives joked about how crackdowns against so-called pill mills—doctors who illegally prescribe opioids to customers—in Florida will lead to a “max [sic] exodus of Pillbillies heading north.” 

The donation could prove to be a political liability for Ryan, a Democrat running in a state that has been inordinately impacted by the opioid crisis. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that opioid distributors donated at least $27,000 to Ryan’s political campaigns since 2007.

At the same time, the AP found, Ryan voted against bills meant to increase funding for anti-opioid initiatives, such as spending packages for addiction treatment. In a statement to the AP, Ryan’s campaign said one of the donors, Cardinal, is a large employer in Ohio.

The Ryan campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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This QAnon Secretary of State Candidate Is Promising to Reinstall Trump in 2024

Jim Marchant, the GOP candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, appeared on stage alongside former President Donald Trump this weekend and openly boasted that he and his QAnon coalition of candidates would put Trump back in the White House in 2024.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood next to him during a rally in Minden on Saturday night.

Marchant, who is currently the front-runner to win next month’s race, told the crowd that he and the ex-president had something in common.

“President Trump and I lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election,” Marchant said, failing to add that a court dismissed his efforts to re-run the election for a U.S. House seat.

From the very first hours after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Marchant has led the effort to spread the falsehood that the election was stolen. “I have been working since November 4, 2020, to expose what happened and what I found out was horrifying. When I am secretary of state of Nevada, we’re going to fix it.”

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Democrats are operating a series of 51 ‘fake news’ websites pushing left-wing stories in toss-up states in a bid to turn the midterms in their favor, shocking investigation finds

A liberal political media operation being run out of Washington, D.C., and Florida is pushing left-wing stories in 51 different fake news outlets in order to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections, it is claimed. 

The allegations came in a shocking new investigation from Axios that was published on Thursday. 

The report alleges that in the past 12 months, multiple new ‘news’ website have appeared across the country, all run by a company named Local Report Inc. 

They do report a wide variety of stories – but sprinkled throughout are news items pushing Democrat lawmakers and policies.  

Online records show that the Local Report was founded in Tallahassee, Fla. 

Content is provided for the sites from writers who are employed by another left-wing group, the American Independent. The Independent was founded by David Brock, known for other liberal endeavors such as Fox News watchdog, Media Matters for America. 

Other employees at the American Independent include Matt Fuehrmeyer, who previously worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and for disgraced Sen. Al Franken, according to his LinkedIn page.

Franken’s son is also employed by the organization, as is former Sen. Harry Reid’s son, the Daily Caller reported.

Prior to working as the executive editor of the American Independent, Jessica McCreight was part of President Barack Obama’s communications team, according to her LinkedIn page. 

When asked about the connection between the American Independent and the Local Report, McCreight told Axios that the pair had a ‘co-publishing agreement,’ adding that their content is ‘open source’ and they were a ‘partner’ of Local Report’s.

She also said: ‘It’s been widely reported that where local news outlets shut down, dis- and misinformation grows.

‘To combat this challenge, the American Independent has expanded to bring readers local, fact-based news and information on topics and issues that impact their communities,’ McCreight continued.

The Axios report says that the outlets are all based in states that are generally considered swing states in the November elections including Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, Colorado and Arizona. 

Among the titles that are packed with content from American Independent staff are the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Tri-City Record, the Bucks County Standard, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Northern Clark County Herald.

The investigation said the websites come equipped with a certain amount of aggregated local news and sports reporting, accompanied by political commentary and biased news. 

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NBC News Asks Twitter, TikTok to Censor Videos of John Fetterman Speaking

NBC News falsely claimed that footage of John Fetterman struggling to speak during a recent rally was “doctored” and urged social media companies to censor. Fetterman, who suffered a stroke earlier this year, has struggled with public speaking while recovering, something the senate hopeful has himself admitted to. The outlet flagged videos of Fetterman speaking to Twitter and TikTok, baselessly claiming that they were in violation of their political misinformation policies. TikTok complied and removed the videos.

NBC News took issue with highlight reels of a recent Montgomery County rally in which Fetterman struggled through parts of his speech. The outlet accused one prominent conservative social media account of deceptively editing video of speeches to “create the perception that what he was saying was nonsensical.”

The report accused social media platforms of ignoring their own policies “against political misinformation” in allowing the videos to stay up.

NBC News Deputy Editor of technology Benjamin Goggin wrote, “Deceptively edited videos that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter and TikTok exaggerate the speech issues that have plagued John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, after he had a stroke in May.”

Explaining the alleged edits, Goggin claimed they consisted of “cutting out the sound of the audience to make it appear as if he had abruptly stopped speaking (some of the stops occurred when he was pausing during moments of applause and crowd reaction, according to unedited videos seen by NBC News).”

The NBC News reporter singled out popular digital strategist Greg Price, whose supercut of Fetterman’s speech had been 600,000 times when the report was published.

Goggin claimed that the videos violate Twitter and TikTok’s policies “against political misinformation,” and the outlet flagged these videos for the platforms itself. TikTok ultimately removed the videos from its platform.

“So NBC News decided to accuse me of doctoring videos of John Fetterman that I posted. (I didn’t doctor anything),” Price wrote in a tweet. “They also reached out to Twitter to try and get them censored.”

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Joe Biden Enlists China Owned TikTok to Partner with Federal Voting Assistance Program in 2022 Midterm Elections

It is well-known TikTok is owned by Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, which was founded in 2012 by Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming.

For this reason, President Trump announced he was going to ban TikTok.

Trump wisely issued three Executive Orders banning American businesses from working with TikTok (or WeChat).

President Trump did not allow any branch of the Federal government to use the CCP’s TikTok.

Joe Biden revoked President Trump’s TikTok Executive Orders in June of 2021.

Even the head of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requested Apple and Google in June to remove TikTok from their app stores due to ‘serious national security threats’ posed by the said mobile app, as reported by The Gateway Pundit.

In a letter dated June 24, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores as it “harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data” from its American users.

Now this…
Joe Biden just welcomed TikTok into a formal partnership with the Federal Voting Assistance Program, a U.S. government agency set up to help overseas voters in the upcoming US midterm elections.

TikTok just launched their U.S. “Midterms Election Center”.

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Meta steps up information control ahead of US elections

Social media behemoth Meta is beefing up its information-control tactics as the US heads into the 2022 midterm elections, tightening rules on voting misinformation and advertising. The changes were announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

The company will ban new political, social and electoral issue ads during the last week before the election, ensuring no “October surprises” – factual or otherwise – will disturb the information ecosystem. Editing existing ads will also be forbidden, and ads encouraging people not to vote or questioning the legitimacy of the results will not be permitted.

To further ensure the sanctity of the vote, Meta says it is investing in “proactive threat detection” with the aim of countering “coordinated harassment and threats of violence against election officials and poll workers.” The company is also holding regular meetings with the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Elections Directors, state and local elections officials, and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Meta is deploying fact checkers in multiple languages for the midterms and expanding the service to WhatsApp, boasting five new partners in Spanish, including Univision and Telemundo. This is part of a $5 million boost in “fact-checking and media literacy initiatives” ahead of November’s vote.

The platform promised to deploy fewer “labels that connect people with reliable information” during the 2022 season, acknowledging user feedback had tipped them off that such labels were “over-used” in 2020.

Bragging it had banned more than 270 “white supremacist organizations” and deleted over 2.5 million content items tied to “organized hate” in the first quarter of 2022 alone, the platform revealed 97% of the content in question had been removed by its algorithms without anyone reporting it – raising the question of how hateful it was given the absence of an offended party.

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GOP Candidate Alleges Being Blackmailed to Drop Out of Race

An Arizona Republican congressional candidate alleges that he has been blackmailed into dropping out of the race in exchange for having Jan. 6, 2021, charges against his son dropped.

Jeff Zink, a Republican candidate in Arizona running for U.S. Congress, is challenging incumbent Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) who is running for reelection.

The district they run in includes much of Phoenix and is a Democrat stronghold. Zink said he has been campaigning in Phoenix, reaching out to Democrats and focusing on grassroots people.

Zink’s campaign focuses on community improvements, public safety, education, and freedom, especially defending the 2nd Amendment, according to his campaign website.

The challenged incumbent is a proponent of socialist policies and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Gallego suggested in a Twitter post in February to seize trucks that formed a convoy near Washington to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates and redistribute the vehicles to other trucking businesses.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the most radical and influential coalition in the federal government with extensive ties to several major Marxist organizations, according to Trevor Loudon, an author and filmmaker who researches radical and terrorist groups and their covert influence on politics. Loudon is the host of EpochTV’s “Counterpunch” program.

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Dark money gets darker with less disclosure in the 2022 election

Dark money is pouring into U.S. elections, but the vast majority of it is not being disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. 

The 2022 election cycle has already attracted more than $115 million in contributions from and spending by 501(c) groups reported to the FEC, OpenSecrets’ new analysis found. 

Many of the top spenders on so-called “issue” ads that mention candidates are politically-active nonprofits that do not disclose their donors. Issue ads aired on TV or radio are only required to be disclosed in the weeks leading up to an election, and online ads that avoid expressly advocating for an election outcome are not required to be disclosed at all.

Nonprofits that do not disclose their donors reported less than $3 million of their independent spending to the FEC during the 2022 election cycle as of May 19.

Most of the spending on these issue ads has not been disclosed to the FEC because they do not explicitly advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate within the weeks leading up to an election.

One top dark money spender that has yet to disclose any spending to the FEC is American Action Network, a 501(c) nonprofit aligned with House Republican leadership. According to analyses by OpenSecrets and the Wesleyan Media Project, the group has spent more than $9.5 million on TV ads mentioning House candidates and about $800,000 on Facebook ads during the 2022 cycle – none of which have been disclosed to the FEC. 

In addition to its own spending this cycle, American Action Network has given more than $11.5 million to Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Republicans that shares staff and resources with the dark money group.

Senate Republican leadership’s dark money group, One Nation, has also poured millions of dollars into 2022 elections but has yet to disclose any spending to the FEC. The dark money group has spent over $2.8 million this cycle on TV ads and hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital ads tracked by OpenSecrets.

Senate incumbents in swing states such as Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) are among One Nation’s prime targets in ads.

One Nation has avoided disclosing their spending to the FEC by framing the advertising as issue advocacy, as the ads attack Democratic incumbents without explicitly advocating for their election or defeat. One Nation has also given $14.4 million to Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC tied to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that shares staff and resources with the dark money group. The dark money group makes up the majority of the super PAC’s funding, ultimately leaving the donors fueling Senate Leadership Fund undisclosed.

During the 2020 election cycle, One Nation did not disclose any spending to the FEC but poured about $125 million into political contributions and ads — more untraceable money than any other dark money group. 

Dark money groups aligned with Democratic party leadership have also poured millions of dollars into influencing 2022 elections. 

Congressional Democrats’ dark money group, House Majority Forward, has spent more than $2.3 million on TV ads, according to figures from the Wesleyan Media Project, and $453,000 on Facebook ads. 

House Majority Forward gave another $2.5 million in contributions to House Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with House Democratic leadership that shares resources with House Majority Forward.  

Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC received $14.3 million from Majority Forward, a dark money group that shares the super PAC’s staff and resources. Majority Forward has spent more than $2.1 million on TV ads and about $250,000 on Facebook ads during the 2022 cycle. 

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‘If we do this right …’: The new Dem organizing strategy catching fire ahead of the midterms

A group of Democratic strategists is trying to spread a novel organizing tactic in this year’s election. Technically, it’s called “paid relational organizing,” but it boils down to this: paying people to talk to their friends about politics.

Democrats think it helped them win the Senate in 2020 — and are hoping the get-out-the-vote strategy will help limit the pain of a brutal 2022 election environment.

Conversations with friends, family members or neighbors are more likely to earn a voter’s support than chats with a stranger at their front door, which is the traditional way campaigns have run paid canvassing programs in the past. And an important test case for deploying the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 when now-Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer relational program to get people talking to acquaintances instead of strangers about the election.

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DeSantis Democrat Challenger Nikki Fried’s Website Hid Radical Positions from Spanish-Language Section

Democrat Florida Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried, who is running to challenge Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, allegedly presented a more moderate agenda on the Spanish page of her campaign website than on the English page, Newsweek reported Monday.

Two hours after journalists requested for comment, Fried’s team reportedly changed the Spanish and English sections of the website to more closely mirror each other, according to the publication.

“Our website copy, now updated, was in the process of being properly and professionally translated,” Max Flugrath, communications director for Fried’s campaign told Newsweek.

Newsweek was able to archive the website before it was changed. According to the publication, the original Spanish page on Fried’s campaign site was 95 words long, and the only policy mentioned was Fried’s support for legalizing marijuana. In contrast, the English page notes Fried’s more leftist agenda, including criminal justice reform, gun control, and the environment.

Florida has the third largest population of Latino voters behind California and Texas, according to a Pew Research Center study. Overall, the Latino population made up a record 17% of the state’s voters in 2020.

The Hispanic vote in Florida has been shifting more toward the GOP in recent years. While former President Donald Trump did not win the Latino vote in the 2020 election, Cubans were overwhelming split 56-41 for the Republican incumbent compared to an even 49-49 split between non-Cuban voters, AS/COA reported.

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