Political Hucksters Harm the Conservative Movement

All of Conservative America would not be surprised to hear that money given to the Democratic Party, a largely immoral and criminal party, and its political action committees (PACs) is misspent and goes into the pockets of the organizers more so than it gets to any candidate, but they expect much more from the Republican Party which claims to represent the “Moral Majority”. The sad truth is that conservatives are being defrauded and scammed by PAC operators and fundraisers on or near every election cycle and during every major unfolding political crisis…

…and a lot of self-proclaimed watchdogs sound one false alarm after another rather than expose the efforts of former allies of President Trump to line their own pockets, diverting funds away from endeavors that would actually facilitate President Trump’s agenda, a major problem that is also experienced in many other Republican campaigns.

Each new election and each new political cause finds Americans inundated by repetitive pleas for money that can and often do quickly change focus to the scandal of the day, whether it is pertaining to illegal immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton escaping justice or Benghazi and Islamic terrorism. Old PACs associated with dormant issues or newly neutralized politicians are shifted to newly perceived money making issues.

These groups run all sorts of polls and studies, and they know where the profit is to be found among conservative base voters who are searching for outsider candidates, and their scams eventually take their toll. Conservatives think they are giving to a greater cause than themselves, but when results are short due to the lion’s share of the money being siphoned off by so-called “consultants”, everybody soon gets burned out and quits donating money, even to the legitimate causes.

Just prior to the 2018 elections, the Tea Party Majority Fund raised $167 million and donated $35,000 to candidates. During this same period, Conservative Majority Fund raised $1 million and donated $7500, while Conservative Strike Force raised $258,376 and donated nothing to any candidate.

Put Vets First raised approximately $4 million, in 2018, and only gave $9000 to candidates.

In 2014, out of $43 million raised by thirty-three separate political action committees, supposedly affiliated with the Tea Party, only $3 million was spent on ads and candidates facing tough campaigns often highlighted in the appeals. The rest went to operating expenses, including $6 million to companies owned or managed by the operators of the PACs, according to a study by Politico.

Also in 2014, the Black Republican PAC raised $700,000, and it only spent one percent of those contributions on candidates and ads supporting them, according to government filings.

It’s also worth noting that the 2015 National Draft Ben Carson for President PAC raised thirteen million dollars, none of which went to Mr Carson. Armstrong Williams, business manager for Carson, said: “People giving money think it’s going to Dr. Carson and it’s not … Our hands are tied. We don’t want people exploited.”

In 2016, Roger Stone’s Committee to Restore America’s Greatness raised $587,000 and only spent $16,000 for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. 2

Great America PAC raised nearly $29 million from small donations, in 2016, and donated $30,125 to candidates running for federal office. In 2018, donations totaled $8.3 million with almost $32,000 going to candidates.

Some PACs also make large payments to vendors they own or are run by people who work for them, as an unscrupulous means to hide how much the PAC consultants are making, which is exactly what the Senate Conservatives Fund and American Crossroads were caught doing one year. Such payments don’t have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, so nobody really knows where the money goes, and all of this should set off red flags for donors, as it represents a huge conflict of interest and facilitates fine and decent Americans being separated from their hard earned dollars through the perpetration of a fraud.

Even worse, most of these PACs prosper off of outright, blatant lies they tell conservatives. Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke didn’t want to run for the Senate in Wisconsin, and Laura Ingraham, Fox News host, was’t interested in running for the Senate in Virginia. The PACs play the hero for conservative values and freedom against the many real threats of today, and some they invent, when they’re actually nothing more than coastal political operatives keeping most of the money for themselves.

All of this has severely hurt the Conservative Movement in America, by possibly being a large factor in the GOP’s loss of control of the U.S. House of Representatives. This loss has severely damaged President Trump’s policy agenda and has him wasting too much valuable time on defense.

Imagine how different results might have been in 2018, if only $10 million of the roughly $177 million raised by PACs had been spent on real campaigns in the twenty House districts that Republicans lost by five percentage points or less. The extra $500,000 per campaign might just have made the difference in Mia Love’s district in Utah, where she would have won, if she had only received 625 more votes.

In Maine’s 2nd District, Bruce Poliquin needed about 3500 more votes. Karen Handel, running in Georgia’s 6th, needed 8000 more votes; and, in California’s 21st District, David Valadao lost by a mere 900 votes.

SHOW me de Monee

Day after day, year after year, little old ladies are called and emailed with dire news and warnings that America’s future is at stake if a certain amount of money isn’t raised in a specific time frame — that the nation is doomed — and so, these little old ladies donate money that many of them really can’t afford, because they love America and believe they’re making the world better. Unfortunately all they are doing is making these telemarketers wealthier. And in the meantime, conservative candidates are losing elections, biting the dust, convinced that if they had just had another few hundred thousand dollars, they might have been victorious.

Any Trump supporter or conservative should be livid.

Going into the 2020 election season, conservatives must do their dead level best to make contributions directly to the candidate’s campaign office, or better yet the candidate himself. Stop handing your hard earned money over to the political hucksters seeking to cash in on the angst of conservative voters and end this terrible blight on the Conservative Movement, ridding it of those self-interested confidence men acting at cross purposes to America’s best interests.

June 9, 2019

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.