Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post South Korea Opens the Door for Ukrainian False Flag Attack on Civilians appeared first on Global Research.
On Saturday, April 15, a heart-wrenching tragedy occurred in Las Vegas when 33-year-old Shiva Gummi stabbed his wife to death. According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, Gummi contacted 911 and told the dispatcher that he had wounded himself. When asked if his wife could help to quell the bleeding from his lacerations, he bluntly replied that she was dead. When police arrived at the couple’s home, they discovered a “large bloody kitchen knife” lying beside them. At the residence, Gwendoline Amsrala, 28 was pronounced dead.
Although Gummi and Amsrala had never reported domestic abuse problems, a witness said that the man was upset because his spouse was out the night before. It was found out that Gummi was also out that night and returned to their house at 11 PM, while Amsrala returned at 9 PM. It was said that the man was irritated that his companion had stayed out with her drunken friend after an evening of drinking.
Gummi was delivered to a nearby hospital in a critical state and subsequently arrested for open murder with a weapon. Amsrala had recently graduated from UNLV’s School of Medicine in 2022 and was passionate about providing for her patients. Her chief there created a GoFundMe drive to support the family. Although it is impossible to replace the immense loss of her life, her friends and family are trying to cope with their grief by remembering her fantastic sense of humor, resilience, leadership, and her beautiful smile.
The untimely death of Amsrala has distressed the Las Vegas community. The police are still examining the incident, while Gummi’s legal representative has yet to make a statement. While the pain of her loss is inevitable, her family and friends keep her wonderful memory alive as they celebrate her legacy.
On April 14, tragedy struck the community of Henrico County, Virginia, when Shelby Jacobs, age 49, was fatally shot while assisting his friend in taking a television to the dumpster outside his friend’s apartment.
Surveillance footage tells a devastating testimony, revealing the image of suspect Dyven G. Henderson, 18, of Henrico, directly looking into the security camera moments before the shooting.
Alvinea Lee, Shelby Jacobs’ cousin, has grief-stricken memories of Jacobs as a generous and kind person, whose positivity and energy constantly painted laughter and lightened the atmosphere. She tells WTVR, “He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; he’d give his last even though he didn’t have much.”
Fortunately, police were able to locate Henderson at a nearby motel and take him into custody. He is now facing charges after being arraigned of second-degree murder and also using a firearm in the commission of a felony. The motive for the murder is still unknown.
Jacobs’ death leaves a void in both his family and the greater community. All that is left is the unanswered questions and a plea for the public’s help. Henrico Police urges anyone with information on the shooting to contact 804-501-5000 or Crime Stoppers 804-780-1000 to lend their assistance in bringing justice and closure.
A night of tragedy in Arvada, CO, resulted in the senseless death of 20-year-old Alexa Bartell and two other motorists’ injuries due to tossed rocks. Alexa was driving home after work on Wednesday evening when her phone suddenly dropped. Her friend tracked her down using her phone’s location, where they discovered her car had been forced off the road in a field, her body inside, and the windshield shattered with a rock embedded in it.
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (JSCO) determined the cause of death to be a homicide, the rock having been thrown through her windshield. The incident occurred in a series of rock-throwing events in the area that night; the other incidents resulted in two minor injuries and damaged cars, though no other fatalities. Police have recovered some of the rocks that were used, and they assume there is more that was thrown that night.
Law enforcement is now asking for people to be cautious and aware of their surroundings and to check the footage from their security and dashboard cameras for any information that could help bring the culprit to justice.
This tragedy serves as a wake-up call to think twice before displaying any behaviors that have the potential to harm others and to exercise due diligence in reporting any suspicious behavior. Let us all remember Alexa Bartell’s life and use it as inspiration to foster a safer and more vigilant environment.
When reading last week’s “How the Deep State Took Down Nixon” in Compact, a new self-identified “radical” post-liberal journal, Oliver Stone came to mind.
In Stone’s 1995 “Nixon” biopic, Anthony Hopkins as Nixon realizes he’s not really the most powerful man in the country but is instead beholden to the “beast.” At one point Nixon is driven down a long dusty Texas rural driveway to meet who is apparently really in charge, an oil billionaire named Jack Jones and played by Larry Hagman (better known as “J.R.” in “Dallas”) But the “beast” is more expansive as a conglomeration of big business and intelligence agencies manipulating events for their own power and profit across decades.
In the film, the “beast” is also represented by CIA director Richard Helms, villainously portrayed by Sam Watterson (better known as the indefatigable “Law & Order” prosecutor “Jack McCoy”), who vaguely threatens Nixon with what happened to JFK, i.e., assassination. The “beast” won’t tolerate Nixon’s peacemaking because it profits from war. “Nixon” is a follow-up to Stone’s 1991 biopic “JFK,” which portrays the “beast” killing JFK for the same reason, his aversion to war.
The Compact article essentially agrees with Oliver Stone that Nixon was taken down by the “national security state.” Nixon wanted détente with the Soviets, U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, rapprochement with China. The “deep state” wasn’t going to tolerate at. The Watergate break-in was actually set up by the CIA to destroy Nixon. According to the article, the FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA weren’t “fighting to limit “the imperial presidency” but guarding their own “institutional autonomy” and “interagency consensus.” Nixon challenged and defeated that “consensus,” precipitating his downfall. And now, “mindful of Nixon’s fate, most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus.”
Such narratives claiming that an ongoing all powerful secret cabal really controls the levers of power are always appealing. They seem to comprehensively explain why so much is wrong. It turns politics into a simple morality play pitting noble outsiders against the sinister “system.” We the people, however we choose to self-identify, are innocent victims to a more powerful elite who cannot be dislodged. “We” deserve so much better. But who will deliver us? We need a political “savior!” Compact editor Sohrab Ahmari tweeted: “Long live Nixon.”
Nixon was not a savior, or even outside the post-WWII consensus, of which he was a chief champion. He was a very talented, intelligent politician who believed in America but also was insecure, paranoid, and conniving. His paranoia, insecurity and obsessions directly fueled his administration’s ridiculous felonies like the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. He perhaps could have survived the revelation had he not launched an even more absurd cover-up that prolonged the crisis over a grueling two years, domestically and internationally weakening America, guaranteeing the collapse of Southeast Asia, and subjecting the country to the horror of a presidential self-implosion.
The conspiracy theory by Compact asserts or implies the deep state tricked the Nixon Administration into an illegal and bungled burglary, orchestrated the D.C. police arrest of the burglars, and inveigled Nixon and staffers into a prolonged and hapless cover-up attempt accompanied by the president’s personal melt-down, and recorded by the president’s own taping devices, with nearly all his staffers turning state’s witness. The “smoking gun” that doomed Nixon recorded him instructing the CIA to claim responsibility for the Watergate break-in so the FBI would not investigate. It was a ridiculous proposal. Hardly a conspiracy, the Watergate fiasco was tragic clown show.
Despite his supposed vast powers as portrayed by Compact and Oliver Stone, CIA Director Helms was fired by Nixon and sent to Iran as ambassador. Compact also cites J. Edgar Hoover, who of course had already died before the Watergate break-in. Nixon’s appointed successor FBI Acting Director Patrick Gray quickly imploded thanks to his own mishandling of Watergate. Compact faults FBI Deputy Director and Hoover acolyte Mark Felt, later revealed to be the Washington Post’s “Deep Throat” source.
Hoover, Helms and Felt all had long government careers, like Nixon, with equally complex records and motives. That they connived together to destroy a presidency is ridiculous. Hoover, a long-time Nixon friend, was probably the one senior figure, had he lived, who could have counseled Nixon away from the Watergate disaster.
Conspiracy narratives try to synthesize complicated and contradictory motives and actors into a single cohesive purpose, which is rarely plausible. Human nature is such that most people, even at their most devious, are typically responding day by day to events according to their best lights, not plotting intrigues with large numbers of people that require years to unfold.
All persons and institutions are self-interested and self-protective, competing against each other for advantage. Hoover, Felt, Helms and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not opposed to détente with the Soviet Union or negotiations with the North Vietnamese. They jealously guarded their own institutional prerogatives. Nixon even more so guarded his, and obsessed over enemies, real and imagined. He kept secrets and distrusted them, as he distrusted nearly everyone, and they responded in kind. The White House “plumbers” were created to plug leaks in the administration and ended up committing burglaries and plotting other felonies.
Nixon often had nutty ideas, sometimes fueled by drink, like firebombing the Brookings Institution, which his more experienced aides knew to ignore. Less experienced aides sometimes took him seriously. Figures like Hoover and Helms often rightfully protected their agencies from egregious administration politicization or criminal proposals. Hoover, for example, shrewdly blocked the infamous “Huston Plan,” crafted by a very young Nixon staffer, for mass illegal wiretaps and break-ins to combat domestic terrorism.
Interestingly, Nixon seems to have had not much interest in conspiracy claims about Watergate. He refused to meet the authors of Silent Coup, one book Compact sites. Perhaps he was too much of a realist to believe such fantasies, however appealing. Claims of conspiracy are typically escapes from reality. They also feed our own egos and self-righteousness by imagining that our preferences are noble but defeated by undefined vast sinister forces with almost supernatural power. Real life, especially as seen through the prism of Christianity, in which God is sovereign and fallible humans have agency but limited power, is more complicated and interesting.
Human nature can sink to fathomless depravity but thankfully is restricted by divine grace. People with sinister plots may imagine they can orchestrate large events in their favor with precision but are almost always disappointed. The good news is that the wicked, no less than the righteous, are highly fallible.
Claims about a dark “deep state” 50 years ago or now distract from addressing an always more challenging reality. Bureaucracies of all sorts, especially government, are inert, wasteful, self-serving, and resistant to external direction. Yet they also bring some continuity and wider consciousness of public service beyond passing partisan desires. No person or entity, neither a Nixon nor an agency like the FBI, can be completely entrusted with power. They must be balanced against each other.
For Oliver Stone in “Nixon,” and seemingly for Compact, the explanation for the world’s evils lies at the end of a long Texas driveway with a deviously smiling oilman portrayed by Larry Hagman. But in God’s real world, there’s a bit of Larry Hagman in each of us, all the time, trying to completely control, but, thankfully, denied that power. We might recall Nebuchadnezzar’s prayer to the “King of heaven, all of whose works are truth, and His ways justice. And those who walk in pride He is able to put down,” as “among the inhabitants of the earth, no one can restrain his hand.”
The post Deep State Theology appeared first on Providence.
Eugene Debs with Texas and Oklahoma socialists, c. 1910–14. Debs, top row center; E. O. Meitzen, center with gray beard; directly above Meitzen, Theodore Debs; to left of Meitzen, Tom Hickey (with dark beard); to left of Hickey, Oklahoma Socialist Party leaders Patrick Nagle (with mustache) and Fred Holt (partially cut off). (Courtesy Ann Meitzen)
When we think about socialism in the United States, we tend to think of big Northern cities like New York. But in the early 1900s heyday of the Socialist Party of America, many of its most notable figures and strongest bases of support were rooted in the rural Midwest, Far West, and South.
Few states better showcase this agrarian socialism than Texas, where the agricultural worker played a pivotal part in the state Socialist Party, and a German immigrant family by the name of Meitzen — who fled their homeland after the failed 1848 revolution — formed part of the “radical glue,” historian Thomas Alter II writes, “that held the [farmer-labor] coalition together.” Otto Meitzen, his son E. O., and his grandson E. R. — as well as their spouses — forged a multigenerational radicalism in the Lone Star State; E.O.’s political activity stretched from the Greenback and Populist movements of the late 1800s all the way through the height of the Socialist Party in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Along with land reform and labor rights, these Texas Socialists promoted radical positions like women’s suffrage and support for the Mexican Revolution while bumping up against the nascent Jim Crow regime.
Jacobin contributor Yaseen Al-Sheikh sat down with Alter to discuss his recently released book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, and the forgotten tales of the Texas Socialist Party, which flourished until state-sponsored suppression came down upon them.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth is the story of an international, multigenerational struggle for a just economic and political order. Tell us about the Meitzens, a “Forty-Eighter” family, starting with the failed revolution of that year in Germany and how it shaped their politics once they moved to the States.
Thomas Alter II
The Meitzens were from the province of Silesia in the then German state of Prussia. While the Silesian economy was primarily agricultural, it was also one of the most industrialized areas of the Germanic states due to the growing textile industry. In many ways, Silesia is the soul of Marxism. It was the 1844 Silesian Weavers Revolt that showed Marx the working class in action and its revolutionary potential.
While in other regions of Europe, the 1848 revolutions were led by middle-class forces that called for a constitutional monarchy, in Silesia it was led in part by organizations based in the working classes that forged an alliance between workers and peasants calling for a socialist republic. When the Meitzens and Forty-Eighter Silesians immigrated to Texas, they brought with them their working-class politics based on an alliance of laborers and working farmers.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
A central theme of your book is the strength of this farmer-labor bloc in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Can you talk about this coalition and how it shaped the country’s politics?
Thomas Alter II
The dominant image of working-class people in the United States during this time is that of an urban industrial factory worker, even though, up to the 1920s, the majority of people lived in rural areas and had jobs connected to agriculture. Even large number of industrial wage workers viewed wage work as hopefully temporary until they could afford to buy their own farm.
As such, agrarian-based demands for land reform came not only from farm areas but urban areas as well. Those working the land also saw how easily they could become wage laborers and in turn advocated labor demands such as union rights and the eight-hour day. Whether one toiled in a Chicago factory or as a tenant farmer in a Texas cotton field, one faced capitalist exploitation.
A family of cotton farmers in Texas, 1913. (Wikimedia Commons)
The sustained farmer-labor bloc began with the Knights of Labor, Greenback Labor Party, and Grange of the 1870s and 1880s. It then progressed through the Farmers’ Alliance, the Populist movement, the Socialist Party, the Nonpartisan League, and attempts to form a labor party during the 1920s.
Working independently of the Democratic and Republican parties, the bloc served as a bulwark against unrestrained capitalism. Though enacted into law in much watered-down versions, many of the historic reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras originated and were tirelessly championed by organizations within the farmer-labor bloc. Without their efforts, I think it is hard to see either of these eras of reform happening.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party of America was a heterogenous organization that looked very different from state to state. Trade unionist Eugene Debs, of Indiana, was the party’s perennial presidential candidate, and members included everyone from Jewish garment workers in New York City to tenant farmers in Oklahoma; everyone from the incendiary Big Bill Haywood to the “sewer socialist” Victor Berger. What did the Socialist Party look like in Texas?
Thomas Alter II
The Texas Socialist Party was overwhelmingly based and geared toward working farmers — small landowners, tenants, and sharecroppers. By 1910, 52 percent of all Texas farmers were tenant farmers. Among black farmers, the rate reached as high as 80 percent in some counties. Working farmers squeezed by landlords, bankers, land speculation, Wall Street speculation, middlemen, and high railroad freight rates turned against the capitalist system.
The party campaigned on a program of ending tenancy and sharecropping. It called for a tax on land held for speculation to make speculation unprofitable, the nationalization of railroads, and a proposal that once a tenant paid half the land’s value in rent, they would receive the title to the land. Socialists declared, “Use and occupancy as the only just title to land.”
By 1910, 52 percent of all Texas farmers were tenant farmers. Among black farmers the rate reached as high as 80 percent in some counties.
The party was also the only one in Texas for years advocating women’s suffrage, and it promoted Margaret Sanger’s birth control campaign. The party was not limited to farmers, having locals in urban areas, and one of the largest state locals was among coal miners west of Fort Worth. Texas Socialists actively campaigned for traditional labor and union demands as well.
In many histories of the Socialist Party, farmers are placed on the right wing of the party as “petty bourgeois” landowners. This is inaccurate. As noted, most Socialist farmers did not own the land they worked. And Texas Socialists openly identified with the party’s left-wing led by Big Bill Haywood. The Texas SP ran vigorous electoral campaigns and at the same time saw the importance of direct action as advocated by Haywood. When Haywood was expelled from the party in 1912 for promoting militant strikes, this angered many Texas Socialists and caused a decline in party membership.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
One of the central organizing tools in rural settings like Texas was the encampment. What were these encampments, and how did they reflect the internal life of the party?
Thomas Alter II
The encampments were usually held during the summer, in between planting and harvest seasons, and lasted two to three days, sometimes an entire week. They featured food, music, dancing, fair rides, and plenty of political talks and meetings. These massive gatherings drew upward of ten thousand people, mostly farmers, especially if popular speakers like Debs, Mother Jones, Kate Richards O’Hare, or Big Bill Haywood were in attendance.
Education was one of the main purposes of the encampments, but even more so, participants would feel empowered being around large numbers of comrades, giving them a true sense of being part of a movement. The mass participation in the encampments reflected the bottom-up, decentralized nature of the Texas Socialist Party, contrasting with the more top-down organization of the party in urban areas like the Wisconsin SP under Victor Berger.
One could argue that people attended the encampments not so much for socialist politics but rather to escape the drudgery of farm life. This, however, is not what Debs found when he attended the 1914 summer encampments in Texas and Oklahoma. Of the encampment attendees, Debs observed:
The most class-conscious industrial workers in the cities are not more keenly alive to the social revolution nor more loyal to its principles or more eager to serve than are these farmers. These are Socialists, real Socialist, and they are ready for action, and if the time comes when men are needed at the front to fight and die for the cause, the farmers of Texas and Oklahoma will be found there and their wives and children will not be far behind them.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
One major shortcoming of the Texas Socialist Party was black rights, though views varied within the state party. The Meitzens, for instance, were more thoroughgoing racial egalitarians than another party leader, Tom Hickey. So what was the Texas party’s record on black rights? And how might the Texas Socialists have fared had they more aggressively attempted to integrate the black citizenry into the struggle?
Thomas Alter II
The Texas party’s record on black rights was rather poor. It saw how the ruling class used race to divide the working class, yet it offered no specific program to fight racism. Instead, the SP argued that overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist society would automatically end racism.
Debs called on all workers regardless of race to join the SP on equal terms. However, the Texas SP did not even initially do this. In the first years of its existence, it followed Jim Crow practices with segregated meetings. When the Texas SP created the Renters’ Union in 1911 to organize tenant farmers, it limited membership to “white persons over 16 years of age.”
‘The most class-conscious industrial workers in the cities are not more keenly alive to the social revolution nor more loyal to its principles or more eager to serve than are these farmers.’
Eugene Debs, circa 1910s. (Wikimedia Commons)
However, the racially exclusive membership policy of the Renters’ Union did not last long. In 1912, lumberjacks in western Louisiana organized by the IWW were making modest gains against the lumber barons through interracial organizing and direct-action tactics. Inspired by this, the Renters’ Union, at its 1912 convention, eliminated the word “white” from its membership requirements and called on black tenant farmers to organize separate local unions. Still, from the available evidence, one does not find black farmers forming their own locals of the Renters’ Union, and very few African Americans joined the Texas SP.
It is hard to say how the Texas SP would have fared had it truly attempted to stand up for black liberation. Following World War I, black Texas veterans returned home determined to fight for their rights, and militant chapters of the NAACP were formed across the state. By this time, though, the Texas SP had been repressed due to its opposition to the war. And after a brief flurry of civil rights activism, the NAACP in Texas was rapidly repressed as well by the state government.
An interracial alliance of workers in the Texas SP definitely would have made our class and the party stronger. At the same time, it would have attracted the full force of white supremacist terrorism, most likely crushing the movement. Yet even in defeat, a black-white alliance of workers in the Texas SP would have provided a shining example and laid an earlier foundation to put us in a better position to win racial and economic justice in our present.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
One admirable episode in the Texas party’s history was its linking with Mexican revolutionaries, whom Hickey and others admired for their bravery and tenacity. How did the Texas Socialists get involved in this fight south of the border for tierra y libertad? And what does it tell us about their view of internationalism?
Thomas Alter II
Many white Texas Socialists held racist views toward Mexicans, viewing them as slavish peons. But the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 caused a change in racial attitudes among Texas Socialists; while white Socialists were calling for a revolution on the land, Mexicans were actually doing it. Texas Socialists no longer saw Mexicans as peons but fellow comrades.
The Texas SP held aloft the Mexican Revolution as an example to emulate if the party’s land reform demands were not enacted. The party campaigned against US military intervention in Mexico, supported speaking tours of Mexican revolutionaries, and frequently reprinted articles by Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón. The party’s support of the Mexican Revolution, as led by Emiliano Zapata, along with its own land reform program, drew large numbers of ethnic Mexicans into the Texas SP.
The party campaigned against US military intervention in Mexico, supported speaking tours of Mexican revolutionaries, and frequently reprinted articles by Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón.
In his 1914 campaign as the SP candidate for governor of Texas, E. R. Meitzen declared that our “only gauge of battle shall be the principles of International Socialism.” Internationalism in principle and action guided Texas Socialists. It led them to support the Mexican Revolution, the cause of Irish republicanism, and oppose US involvement in World War I.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
The repression of the Socialist Party during and after World War I was a major reason for its precipitous decline across the country. Was that the main cause of the party’s demise in Texas? And what did that repression look like?
Thomas Alter II
The repression of the Texas Socialist Party began before the war, with Texas Rangers and the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) targeting ethnic Mexican party members in a campaign of harassment, censorship, jailings, and deportations. The party came to the defense of members, though the repressive campaign had its desired effect, with many ethnic Mexicans leaving the party.
An edition of The Rebel, the state party’s newspaper, from 1911. (UT San Antonio Libraries)
Once the US entered the war, the Texas SP’s weekly newspaper, the Rebel, was the first periodical barred from the US mail by the federal government. The Rebel had the third-highest circulation of socialist newspapers nationally. Texas Rangers and US Marshals kidnapped party leader Tom Hickey and held him incommunicado for two days before a lawyer obtained his release. Numerous Socialists were arrested across the state, with some serving lengthy prison sentences along with other political prisoners at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
This repression effectively crushed the once vibrant Texas Socialist Party.
Yaseen Al-Sheikh
What happened to the Meitzens after the decline of the party? And what is the legacy of the Texas Socialist Party and the Meitzens today?
Thomas Alter II
After the decline of the Texas SP, the Meitzens put much of their organizing efforts into building the Nonpartisan League (NPL), based in North Dakota. The NPL won control of the North Dakota state government after 1915 and began enacting reforms to benefit working farmers, such as a state-run bank and grain elevators.
E. R. Meitzen was a national organizer for the NPL and attempted to build it in Texas through an alliance of farmers and urban workers in the Houston area. The NPL shared the same demise as the SP through government repression.
Meitzen then participated in the numerous farmer-labor conventions of the 1920s that attempted to form a labor party, working closely with communists though not joining the Communist Party himself. Needing to provide for a growing family, Meitzen moved his family to northern Florida, where he ran a local newspaper and joined the successful campaign against the state poll tax in 1941.
By this time, Meitzen and many of his co-thinkers had decided that their best option in fighting for working-class-based reforms was to join the left-wing of the New Deal coalition and attempt to change the Democratic Party from within. Farmer-labor activists had attempted this tactic numerous times since the 1870s with the same failed results. Though rarely achieving electoral success, the farmer-labor bloc, when acting independently of the two-party system, moved the political spectrum to the left and brought about meaningful reforms while raising class consciousness.
Independent working-class political action and internationalism are the lasting legacies of the Meitzens and the Texas Socialist Party.
Conservative activist Leonard Leo’s ties to Florida governor Ron DeSantis are the strongest among the potential 2024 Republican presidential contenders. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
The Republican operative leading the super PAC backing Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was closely involved with a record-breaking dark money donation to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, the architect of the Supreme Court’s rightward swing, according to records obtained by the Lever.
Chris Jankowski, CEO of the pro-DeSantis group Never Back Down, is listed in the documents as the “settlor” — effectively, the creator — of the Marble Freedom Trust, a massive pool of cash Leo is using to finance conservative advocacy groups.
In 2021, the trust received $1.6 billion from the sale of Chicago businessman Barre Seid’s surge-protector empire, constituting the largest known dark money donation in history and leaving Leo in control of an unprecedented political advocacy fund.
The role Jankowski played in developing the Marble Freedom Trust has not previously been reported, though he has for years served as a consultant for Leo’s dark money network, which played a central role in flipping control of the Supreme Court and building its 6–3 conservative supermajority.
“Mr. Leo has known Chris Jankowski for many years and considers him one of the most effective political strategists in the country,” said a spokesperson at Leo’s consulting firm, CRC Advisors. “Governor DeSantis’s Never Back Down PAC is fortunate to have him there.”
Never Back Down and Jankowski did not respond to the Lever’s requests for comment.
Jankowski’s current role with the DeSantis super PAC is just one place where Leo’s influence will be felt throughout the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Leo, who helped select and install three Supreme Court nominees as President Donald Trump’s top judicial adviser, has used his dark money network to distribute major donations to nonprofits affiliated with several other potential primary contenders, including Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.
Leo’s ties to DeSantis are perhaps the most extensive among the potential 2024 Republican presidential contenders. The Florida Republican’s crusade against “woke capital” and his recent decision to sign a six-week abortion ban seem to be perfectly calibrated to appeal to Leo, a hard-line social conservative who has financed a broader messaging war against “woke capitalism.”
Jankowski, a longtime conservative operative, is best known for spearheading the Republican State Leadership Committee’s highly successful 2010 Project Redmap campaign — an effort to tip state house elections across the country and then use the redistricting process to help the GOP lock in a long-lasting advantage in congressional and state legislative elections.
Since 2014, Jankowski has been periodically identified as a consultant with the Judicial Crisis Network, a key dark money cog in Leo’s campaign to remake both the federal and state courts.
“In 2016 to 2018, Chris served as a lead consultant to the Judicial Crisis Network’s successful Supreme Court confirmation campaigns,” read Jankowski’s bio on one conservative nonprofit’s website. “These efforts blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland and pushed for confirmation of Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. These unprecedented efforts, with almost $30 million spent, helped create a new conservative majority on the court.”
Records obtained by the Lever show that Jankowski helped Leo establish the Marble Freedom Trust, his $1.6 billion landmark dark money fund. Jankowski was the trust’s settlor — which generally means a trust’s creator or donor.
The donation for the trust came from Seid, who, as part of his “attack philanthropy” strategy, gifted the entirety of his electronics business to the trust, which then sold it.
Now Jankowski is helming Never Back Down, a super PAC that’s preparing to help perform core campaign operations to boost DeSantis, despite the fact that such outside groups cannot directly coordinate with candidates.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that officials at Never Back Down have “been telling donors they intend to push the bounds of what an independent effort can do in presidential years” and are planning “a major push into the sort of organizing in early states that has historically been undertaken by candidates themselves.”
The Post added that “Never Back Down could receive a transfer of the more than $85 million that DeSantis has in a state fundraising account if he becomes a candidate.”
In recent years, Jankowski was listed on the board of advisers at N2 America, a dark money group designed to boost the GOP’s image in the suburbs. The organization campaigned for schools to resume in-person learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic and boosted the confirmation of Trump’s 2020 Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
Tax records show N2 America was primarily funded by Leo’s Concord Fund, which donated at least $1 million to N2 America between 2020 and 2021. The organization reported raising $1.5 million during that time.
DeSantis’s nascent campaign operation includes several other N2 America alumni.
Generra Peck, the organization’s vice president, is reportedly expected to serve as DeSantis’s 2024 campaign manager if he runs, and is currently working as a consultant for his Florida-level political committee.
Phil Cox, who served on N2 America’s board of advisers, is serving as a senior adviser to Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC led by Jankowski.
Peck and Cox helped lead DeSantis’s 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Peck previously worked at Cox’s consulting firms.
The DeSantis super PAC’s leadership team also includes Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and Trump administration official.
Since 2021, Cuccinelli has been the national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative — an effort designed to protect Republican voter suppression laws around the country — which is part of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion advocacy group.
Leo’s network donated $2.3 million to the Susan B. Anthony List between July 2020 and June 2021.
DeSantis isn’t the only potential GOP presidential contender with significant ties to Leo.
Leo’s Concord Fund contributed $1 million in 2020–21 to Advancing American Freedom, a nonprofit chaired by former vice president Mike Pence that is serving as a “campaign-in-waiting,” according to Politico.
Since 2018, the Leo network has donated $1.5 million to Stand for America, a dark money group founded by Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump United Nations ambassador.
“I’m running for president to renew an America that’s proud and strong, not weak and woke,” Haley said in a speech last month to conservative activists. “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.
