JFK60
JFK60's JournalThe Idaho Freedom Foundation has $$$ ties to the Kochs, DeVos, Coors & Walton families; & BIG corps.
NONE of these “grassroots” demonstrations are just spontaneously occurring. They’re ALL organized and coordinated by interlocking far-right organizations. The funding tentacles of these “respectable appearing” entities reach far and wide. But, as always, their ultimate funding always emanates from the same sources.
All info below is from SourceWatch.org.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Idaho_Freedom_Foundation
The Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) is a conservative 501(c)(3) organization that is a member of the right-wing State Policy Network (SPN) and advocates for conservative state legislation in Idaho. Thanks It is based in Boise and calls itself a research institute that advocates for "free market solutions, private property rights, individual responsibility and transparent, limited government."
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In addition to receiving funding from the State Policy Network and the Donors Capital Fund, both with ties to the Kochs, the Idaho Freedom Foundation is a partner organization in the Charles Koch Institute's Liberty@Work program.
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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_Policy_Network
The State Policy Network (SPN) is a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom. As of October 2019, SPN's membership totals 162. Today's SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party.
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Tax documents and other available records reveal that SPN is funded by the same large corporations, right-wing foundations, and wealthy conservative ideologues that fund ALEC. Some of the most notable corporate funders of SPN and its web of "think tanks" include Big Tobacco companies (like Reynolds), Big Oil corporations (like the Koch family fortune), AT&T, Kraft Foods, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Facebook, and Microsoft.
SPN and its "think tanks" are also largely funded by right-wing special interest groups and individuals, including the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Coors family, the Walton Family Foundation, the Roe Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust.
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SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.
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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Legislative_Exchange_Council
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) describes itself as the largest “membership association of state legislators,” but over 98% of its revenue comes from sources other than legislative dues, primarily from corporations and corporate foundations. After the 2010 congressional midterm elections, ALEC boasted that “among those who won their elections, three of the four former state legislators newly-elected to the U.S. Senate are ALEC Alumni and 27 of the 42 former state legislators newly-elected to the U.S. House are ALEC Alumni.”
ALEC’s agenda extends into almost all areas of law. Its bills undermine environmental regulations and deny climate change; support school privatization; undercut health care reform; defund unions and limit their political influence; restrain legislatures’ abilities to raise revenue through taxes; mandate strict election laws that disenfranchise voters; increase incarceration to benefit the private prison industry, among many other issues.
ALEC is an "associate" member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country.
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Charles Koch is the right-wing billionaire owner of Koch Industries. As one of the richest people in the world, he is a key funder of the right-wing infrastructure, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). In SourceWatch, key articles on Charles Koch and his late brother David include: Koch Brothers, Americans for Prosperity, Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, Stand Together, Koch Family Foundations, Koch Universities, and I360.
Precisely. Further proof that he's utterly unfit.
The COVID-19 pandemic could have been his making, if he possessed even a mote of genuine savvy and empathy. But he doesn’t, so he continues with: unfettered bullshitting; juvenile name-calling; old Soviet-style disinformation; and shameless self-promotion, while the country (and the entire world) is ravaged by a novel virus.
His questionable sanity and proven inability to manage a crisis should reveal to ALL just how horribly unfit he is for the presidency.
His base will stick with him, no matter how awful he is. But I’m hopeful that some former followers have *finally* gotten wise to this two-bit carnival barker.
Isn't Trump's characterizing the COVID-19 warnings as a hoax concocted by Democrats...
... tantamount to claiming that those warnings and alerts were fake, false untrue, and in Trump’s inverted “reality,” were actually nothing more than scare-stories to make him look bad? And by implication, those warnings about the virus are not only something to be ignored, but something to be weaponized against Democrats, which they were indeed.
For awhile, social media was overflowing with belligerent garbage spread by bots and 45’s cult members, all centered on the insane idea that the COVID virus warnings and projections were really a “Democrat (sic) hoax” to ruin Trump’s fantastic, greatest-in-history presidency and his “soaring economy.”
Trump may not have specifically said, “the virus is a hoax,” but he drew the dots and connected half of them for his followers. He’s very cagey about directing his cult. It’s the one thing he does well, regrettably.
And they, like Bush I, beyond the human toll, also brought us economic crashes.
Why are Americans such gluttons for punishment? Why do they keep voting in these jerks?
Why are so many Americans “checked out”?
Why have a shocking number of Americans become so ignorant of facts and science?
Probable answers: first, long-time continuous Republican cuts in funds to education; next, talk radio and cable TV; then, social media and various ideological/nihilistic message boards.
These “advancements” have shut down the critical thinking capacity of susceptible individuals— in some corners, there’s no longer much interest in learning, when a talking head can spoon-feed information (served up in an addictive brew of fear and outrage) that lights up the cortex like a Roman candle?
Worse, the disinformation gets reinforced and embellished in like-minded message boards. How does one unplug this insanity? And if it can’t be disconnected, how does one reality coexist with a vastly different reality, without the eventual breakdown of one of them?
I’ve lost some sleep over this impasse, as it saddens me that my country — the United States, in my lifetime, has reached a crossroads, one with a severe potential for realigning everything familiar into something dark and destructive.
It’s Orwell on steroids.
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