#numbersusa

John Knefel at MMFA:

Several right-wing organizations known mostly for opposing abortion, immigration, and trans rights are also involved in supporting and funding election denial groups, a sign of the issue’s centrality to the MAGA movement.

Following former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and subsequent attempts to remain in power, a complicated and sprawling web of organizations emerged to sow doubt about future elections and spread debunked and baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud. Stringing these overlapping efforts together is the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, an umbrella organization connecting state and national election denial efforts with the broader right-wing policy ecosystem. These groups also significantly overlap with Project 2025, an effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide the next Republican presidential administration with staffing and policy recommendations.  Even as early as March 2021, mere months after Trump’s multifaceted effort to reverse the 2020 election, socially conservative groups began pouring money into election denial initiatives. That trend has only accelerated in the intervening years, with a host of anti-civil rights groups — often euphemistically characterized as engaged in the “culture wars” — having expanded their operations to include so-called election integrity.

These groups include the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the anti-trans American Principles Project, a fund run by Hobby Lobby founder David Green, and high-profile right-wing charities National Christian Charitable Foundation and Christian Community Foundation, among others.  One of the primary myths that the election denial movement has spread this cycle concerns noncitizen voting, which experts agree is exceedingly rare. This manufactured scandal synthesizes two key pillars of the MAGA movement — demonizing immigrants and claiming that elections are rigged against right-wing candidates. The partners listed in the Only Citizens Vote Coalition include anti-immigrant groups the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Immigration Accountability Project, illustrating how election denial groups have incorporated nativism into their movement. Both FAIR and IAP have strong links to the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to as the “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

A rightwing non-profit group that has published a “DEI Watch List” identifying federal employees allegedly “driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives” is bankrolled by wealthy family foundations and rightwing groups whose origins are often cloaked in a web of financial arrangements that obscure the original donors. One recent list created by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) includes the names of mostly Black people with roles in government health alleged to have some ties to diversity initiatives. Another targets education department employees, and another calls out the “most subversive immigration bureaucrats”. The lists come amid turmoil in the US government as Donald Trump’s incoming administration, aided by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has sought to fire huge swathes of the federal government and purge it of DEI and other initiatives – such as tackling climate change – that Trump has dubbed “woke”. While the publication of the personal details of government workers – whom the website describes as “targets” – has reportedly “terrified” many in federal departments, the Guardian has discovered that some current and former employees of AAF have taken pains to conceal their affiliations with the group on LinkedIn and other public websites.

One of the donors to the AAF is the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, which has been a driving ideological force behind Trump’s re-election and first weeks in government. Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said: “It’s not surprising to find a vile project such as this backed by Project 2025 entities and far-right donors who have it out for public employees.” Disclosure documents show that the AAF has been closely involved in training Republican staffers in collaboration with the affiliated Conservative Partnership Institute, in sessions that promise to train rightwing operatives in skills including “open source research” and “working with outside groups”.

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‘Incubated’ by the Conservative Partnership Institute

The most crucial support for AAF, however, has come from the organization that birthed it: the CPI, which continues to have a profound influence on the Trump administration and the Republican party as a whole via its own activities and those of its flotilla of spin-off groups. AAF was founded in 2021 to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration”, as Tom Jones, the organization’s head, told Fox News at the time. [...]

Moulding Maga minds

The Guardian reported last year that CPI had been cementing ties between the far right and the GOP by means of training events for Hill staffers and their bosses in Congress. Many of these events were held at “Camp Rydin”, a sprawling 2,200-acre (890-hectare) property on Maryland’s eastern shore purchased after a $25m donation was made to CPI by its namesake, retired Houston software entrepreneur Mike Rydin, in the wake of January 6. Others were held at one of at least nine adjacent properties on Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue purchased by CPI since 2022, in what reports described as a $41m “shopping spree” that has created a “Maga campus”. CPI literature describes the precinct as “Patriot’s Row”. Records obtained from US Senate and House ethics disclosures indicate that AAF has benefited from being front and center at many of these events. At a 29 May 2024 “Legislative Assistant Symposium” attended by staffers then working for senators including Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and JD Vance, AAF’s Jones was billed as speaking on “strategies for how Congress should approach oversight and accountability”, alongside speakers from CPI, AFL, Advancing American Freedom and anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA. A parallel event with the same line-up drew staffers for hard-right Maga representatives including Anna Paulina Luna – who recently introduced a bill that would see Trump’s face added to Mount Rushmore – and Paul Gosar, who in November invoked antisemitic conspiracy theories in a newsletter defending Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence. NumbersUSA was part of a network of groups “founded and funded” by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center called the “puppeteer of the nativism movement and a man with deep racist roots”. At an event held 15-17 February 2023, hosted by AAF and attended by staffers for Congress members including Luna, Ken Buck and Marjorie Taylor Greene, trainees were to learn skills including “how to effectively draft requests for information from agencies and witnesses”, “tools and techniques for conducting open source research into agencies, individuals, and organizations”, and conducting “mock interviews with reluctant / recalcitrant witnesses”.

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Dirt machine

The dirt machine now targeted at government workers was honed on higher-profile targets during the Biden administration. Early on, AAF pointed its opposition-research machine at Biden nominees including Saule Omarova, nominated for comptroller of the currency; Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated for vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, supreme court justice, whom the organization falsely claimed had been soft on sex offenders.

Democrats Test Pro-Amnesty Messages for 2020 Elections

Democrat pollsters are testing election messages to help Democrats justify a 2021 amnesty for millions of wage-cutting migrants, even as millions of Americans need jobs.

The survey, titled “Winning the Immigration Debate during COVID-19,” was taken in a June-to-July surveyof 1,011 registered voters by Geoff Garin at Hart Research for the American Progress Action Fund. It tested voters’ responses…

Open Borders Moslem Invader Celebrates Death of Immigration Restrictionist

Some stinky moslem invader called Hassan Ahmad is celebrating the death of white American patriot John Tanton on Twitter.

White nationalists mourn the passing of their godfather, architect of the anti-immigrant movement, the guy who might as well have told Stephen Miller how to make America white again. I’ve been fighting to unseal the #TantonPapers for 3 years. What don’t they want us to see?

Tennessee Lawmaker Introduces Bill Making First Time Illegal Entry into the United States a Felony

Washington, DC – On Tuesday, U.S. Congressman Diane Black (R-TN-06) introduced the Zero Tolerance for Illegal Entry Act, which would make illegally entering the United States for the first time a felony and would permanently mandate the E-Verify system for employers, creating less incentive for illegal immigration.

“The United States government should never prioritize illegal immigrants over…