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Accompanied by his allies and super PAC Never Back Down, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is testing the boundaries of campaign finance laws further than ever before.

Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis speaks during a campaign stop at the Greenville Convention Center in Greenville, South Carolina, on June 2, 2023. (Logan Cyrus / AFP via Getty Images)

Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is working to harness the power of big money in open defiance of federal election laws — betting that no one will hold him accountable.

In a political era dominated by wealthy and often secret donors, the activities undertaken by DeSantis and his outside group allies still stand out — and could render what little remains of federal campaign finance laws as completely meaningless.

A pro-DeSantis super PAC reportedly just received an $82 million windfall from the leftover funds in a political committee the governor ran in Florida. The transfer appears to violate federal election rules as written, though election regulators deadlocked and failed to act on a similar, smaller case last year. The contribution comes after the DeSantis administration changed state guidelines to bless such a move.

“DeSantis will reap the rewards of illegally using $82 million of state campaign funds to support his presidential run,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director at political research group Documented. Fischer said there’s a “good chance” the Federal Election Commission (FEC) “will let DeSantis get away with it, and even if the agency does take action, the penalties will only be levied after DeSantis’s campaign already benefited from the illegal spending.”

In recent years, well-funded outside groups like super PACs have become an increasingly integral part of political campaigns. This is primarily because candidates’ campaign committees are restricted by contribution limits (currently $3,300 per person), and super PACs can accept donations of any size — including from corporations that are barred from directly giving to candidates.

Given the state money transfer and the DeSantis campaign’s heavy reliance on a super PAC called Never Back Down, experts say that DeSantis and his allies appear to be testing the boundaries of campaign finance laws further than ever before. Outside groups have employed similar tactics, but never at this scale. His team is effectively betting that the campaign finance cops at the FEC are fully asleep on the job.

Super PACs, according to the reasoning of the judicial decision that led to their creation, are supposed to operate independently from candidates. But Never Back Down is actively raising small-dollar donations for DeSantis’s presidential campaign, running TV and digital ads promoting DeSantis, sending mailers, hosting some of his campaign events, and building its own field team outside the campaign. The super PAC expects to have a $200 million budget, with $100 million for voter outreach, according to the New York Times.

A top DeSantis campaign official, Sam Cooper, recently admitted on a donor call that the campaign is factoring in support from “an outside group” that is going to help the campaign organize in larger states — like California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia — slated to hold primaries on “Super Tuesday” in March 2024, according to leaked audio from a campaign presentation.

Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer at the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, recently told CBS News that the group plans to “do things no other super PAC has done before,” adding: “Every dollar Never Back Down asks for online will go directly to the Ron DeSantis for President campaign.”

Taken together, the group’s activities amount to “a complete end-run around our campaign finance rules, which are in place to curb corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Stephen Spaulding, a vice president at the watchdog group Common Cause.

The DeSantis campaign and Never Back Down did not respond to questions from the Lever.

“DeSantis Is Taking a Very Aggressive Approach”

Super PACs, “independent expenditure-only” committees that can accept unlimited donations, were created in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That ruling was based on the fiction that outside groups’ expenditures in support of candidates are made separately from campaigns — and thus pose low risk for corruption.

“By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate,” the court wrote, concluding that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

The ruling quickly led to the proliferation of super PACs that only exist to support a single candidate. While super PACs were initially often used to launch pricey ad blitzes, the groups have become functionally embedded within campaigns and both political parties — even though they legally cannot coordinate with candidates.

Federal election regulators have failed to police the growing interactions between candidates and super PACs, even as we’ve seen super PACs taping documentaries with candidates, handling advance work for presidential campaign events, and performing opposition research to benefit campaigns.

The FEC, which is made up of three Democratic appointees and three Republicans, has consistently split 3-3 on key policy and enforcement questions, creating new gray areas for campaigns and super PACs to exploit. It can also take the FEC years to issue decisions on campaign finance complaints.

Last year, the FEC deadlocked in a case over whether a Florida congressional candidate violated federal campaign finance laws prohibiting candidates from using nonfederal funds in a federal election that were raised without contribution limits.

Republican lawmaker Byron Donalds formed a Florida political committee — the state equivalent of a super PAC — that later donated $107,000 to a super PAC that boosted his campaign for Congress.

DeSantis’s team is reportedly making the same move with a much larger pot of money — at least $82 million worth — from his Florida political committee, previously known as Friends of Ron DeSantis.

Friends of Ron DeSantis, renamed Empower Parents PAC last month, has now transferred its fortune to Never Back Down, the federal super PAC backing the governor’s presidential campaign, according to Axios.

“A 3-3 deadlock doesn’t mean a practice is legal, it just means the FEC commissioners couldn’t agree,” said Fischer, who filed the complaint against Donalds. “DeSantis is taking a very aggressive approach and betting that if the FEC deadlocked before, it’ll deadlock again. Even if the FEC does find that DeSantis violated the law with this brazen $82 million move, that decision won’t come until years after the election, and the penalty likely will be minimal.”

Stuart McPhail, a litigation counsel at the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said DeSantis and his allies appear to be operating under the assumption that the FEC won’t investigate them.

“There’s no one really guarding the vault here,” said McPhail. “Even if someone did try to enforce the law, you have a current [Supreme] Court that is very skeptical of any kind of campaign finance law. And I think a number of them feel like they have friends on the court. The donors behind the campaign have friends on the court.”

Indeed, the DeSantis super PAC is being led by Chris Jankowski, a veteran Republican operative who helped form the historic $1.6 billion dark money fund helmed by Leonard Leo. As former president Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped select three of the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices.

Friends of Ron DeSantis, the political committee now financing Never Back Down, received $500,000 last fall from the Judicial Crisis Network, the main political advocacy arm of Leo’s dark money network.

Other major donors to the group have included: hedge fund titan Ken Griffin ($10.8 million), budget hotel magnate Robert Bigelow ($10 million), Wall Street trader Jeff Yass ($2.6 million), and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts ($1 million). The conservative Club for Growth PAC donated $2 million to Friends of Ron DeSantis last summer.

The DeSantis team has been laying the groundwork for the big money transfer to the super PAC for some time. Last week, NBC News reported that DeSantis administration officials quietly published new guidance in March asserting that Florida political committees can donate to federal political groups.

The state’s new campaign finance handbook reversed previous guidance from state officials mandating that Florida political committees could only use their funds for Florida political activities, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.

The new language states, “A Florida political committee may make contributions to an out-of-state political entity that engages solely in non-coordinated expenditures.”

“We Have an Outside Group That’s Helping Us”

With Never Back Down, DeSantis and his allies are trying to utilize big, outside money in unprecedented ways — including to help directly fund the governor’s presidential campaign.

The super PAC first raised $500,000 for a DeSantis draft committee, and that cash will soon be transferred to DeSantis’s campaign committee, according to CBS News.

Now that DeSantis is in the race, the donation link on Never Back Down’s website directs supporters to donate to Ron DeSantis for President, the governor’s campaign committee. The super PAC’s donation page on the platform WinRed features disclosures saying the solicitation is paid for by both Ron DeSantis for President and Never Back Down.

Never Back Down has produced multiple videos directing supporters to sign up for text alerts. Supporters who do so receive frequent text messages urging them to donate to Ron DeSantis for President.

“We are SO CLOSE to reaching our one-million-dollar fundraising launch goal to support DeSantis for president,” the group texted on Monday. “We are calling on conservative patriots to please rush anything you can spare to ensure we reach this critical goal.”

According to Fischer, this is not an entirely new tactic. The super PAC backing freshman Sen. J. D. Vance (R-OH) reportedly raised money for his campaign last cycle. However, Fischer added, “To my knowledge, this is the first cycle where we’ve seen single-candidate super PACs driving online donations to presidential campaigns.”

A super PAC backing businessman Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican primary has similarly run digital ads pushing supporters to donate to Ramaswamy’s campaign.

Never Back Down is additionally working to build an expansive field operation that will give DeSantis an advantage in a longer race — a fact that Cooper, the top DeSantis campaign official, touted in a recent donor presentation obtained by Florida Politics.

“There’s really never been a presidential campaign that’s been able to organize past the first four [states],” said Cooper. “You run as hot as you can the first four, Super Tuesday comes and you just kinda hope good things happen to you. That’s not going to be our approach. We’re going to organize in all these states. We have an outside group that’s helping us organize in all these states that’s going to hire bodies, and we’re going to compete.”

On Monday, Never Back Down’s communications director, Erin Perrine, told Newsmax that the super PAC has “knocked over 100,000 doors already” in early states, adding: “That’s not happening for any other candidate at this point in the race.”

For campaign finance experts, Never Back Down’s activities represent the culmination of federal election regulators’ failure to ensure that super PACs can’t simply operate as big money arms of political campaigns.

“The FEC’s inability to enforce campaign finance laws is promoting a culture of near-impunity,” said Fischer. “Candidates know that they can aggressively push the legal envelope and expect to get away with it. But even presidential candidates who are careful to comply with the law still rely on a supportive super PAC to stay competitive. As a result, wealthy special interests have an incredible amount of power and influence over our democracy.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. Under socialism, it would be an instrument of liberation.

As millions more jobs are eliminated, a process that could and should benefit workers will instead be one that makes their lives more difficult and insecure. (Leon Neal / Getty Images)

Last year, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro debated Tucker Carlson on the question of automation. Ventriloquizing a very familiar market-conservative argument, Shapiro asked his guest point-blank whether he would support restrictions on the use of technology in order to protect jobs. In his reply, Carlson was nothing short of incredulous.

Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from folks, and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be these automated cars on the roads. So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, sort of, artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

Carlson: Are you joking? In a second. In a second. In other words, if I were president, would I say to the Department of Transportation, “We’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period”? Why? Really simple. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men in this country.

In this answer, there’s a hint at where Carlson’s argument is ultimately rooted. For him and other social conservatives, the question of automation is primarily about the stability of the traditional family unit, with the male breadwinner at its center. As far as his prescriptions went, Carlson even went as far as saying that the government should contrive a phony pretext for banning self-driving trucks altogether.

There is, of course, a third option that neither Shapiro’s market dogmatism nor Carlson’s reactionary luddism is willing to entertain. As conservatives, both clearly see some inherent good in people having to work. One might favor the “creative destruction” wrought by markets, and the other certain restrictions on them, but neither views technology as a potentially liberatory tool for workers.

And yet it should be. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many simply assumed new technology would eventually give rise to a leisure society in which people free from the necessity of toil would have all the time to explore the world and pursue their interests as they saw fit. Exactly one half of that equation turned out to be true. Technology has made all kinds of difficult tasks easier and less laborious while also making production more efficient. Between 1950 and 2020, America experienced a 299 percent increase in labor productivity, and jobs of all kinds became safer and easier.

Many, however, were also eliminated — and with them the livelihoods they once sustained.

Better telecommunications technology, after all, means you don’t need switchboard operators. Self-checkout units reduce opportunities in retail employment. Aided by machines, factories can now produce more with fewer workers involved. With the advent of artificial-intelligence technologies and self-driving vehicles, the same process will only unfold at an accelerated pace in the decades ahead.

The social consequences of this are frankly alarming to contemplate. Despite being more productive than ever, workers’ wages have long been stagnant, and punishingly long working hours are already causing a needless seven hundred thousand deaths per year, according to the International Labor Organization. As millions more jobs are eliminated and service work in particular becomes more precarious, a process that could and should benefit workers will instead be one that makes their lives more difficult and insecure.

That the current political climate precludes potential solutions to this problem doesn’t make those solutions any less obvious. Modernization presents a clear opportunity to legislate shorter working weeks — something for which there is already historical precedent. As Bernie Sanders put it recently: “In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours — with no loss in pay.” (Iceland’s experiment to this effect, incidentally, has already yielded great results.)

During a recent interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, Sanders also raised the prospect of a robot tax that would compel companies to pay a premium for replacing workers. Though the idea remains underdeveloped at the level of detail, it’s one that’s been floating around in various forms since the 1980s as a potential response to automation and could help generate the revenue needed to fund new public goods and universal services.

In the end, it’s ultimately those public goods and services that represent the best solution to the problems of automation. Despite what some on the Right insist, there is no need to artificially limit technology in order to preserve jobs that can be performed by machines. With high-quality, universal services in place and an economy structured around the imperatives of social need rather than those of private profit, the importance of work in daily life would dramatically recede. Freed from the constant grind of tedious and unnecessary labor, countless millions would be able to spend their time however they chose without having to struggle to obtain the bare necessities of life.

Unless you’re wedded to retrograde ideas about work, gender, and the family, there is no reason not to welcome such a future with open arms.

Local authorities said the victim’s vehicle was hit by at least a dozen bullets.

By JNS

An Israeli driver on Tuesday night was lightly injured by glass shards in a shooting near the Palestinian-controlled village of Huwara, located close to Nablus in Samaria.

The Israel Defense Forces said that the terror attack occurred north of the Tapuah Junction and that troops launched a manhunt for the perpetrators.

Local authorities said the victim’s vehicle was hit by at least a dozen bullets. He was evacuated to the hospital in stable condition.

It comes a day after two Israeli soldiers were wounded when a terrorist rammed them with his vehicle in Huwara.

The driver fled the scene but was captured by Israeli forces following a chase. A knife was found in his vehicle, according to the military.

The victims were evacuated to the Rabin Medical Center’s Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, one with light and one with moderate injuries.

The IDF recently upgraded the road infrastructure in the Palestinian village to increase security for drivers on Route 60, as an interim step until a bypass road can be completed.

The changes followed a series of terrorist attacks there, including the murder of brothers Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, as they sat in traffic on Feb. 26.

Dual Israeli-U.S. citizen David Stern, 41, narrowly survived a shooting on March 19 while he was driving through Huwara with his wife on their way to Jerusalem.

Just days later on May 21, an Israeli soldier was moderately injured in a vehicular assault in the village.

In addition to the infrastructure changes, a large number of IDF personnel have been deployed to the area and 13 new defensive positions were built to discourage attacks and to reduce security forces’ response times.

The IDF’s Samaria Brigade has also bolstered security inspections, including the deployment of additional checkpoint barriers.

The post Again: Israeli civilian hurt in terror attack near Huwara in Samaria appeared first on World Israel News.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of the most famous rabbis in America, describes a bold act of antisemitism that he experienced in the heart of New York City this week.

Antisemitism has gone “out of control,” he said, urging fellow Jews to fight back before it’s too late.

A taxi driver just said me and my wife “You are Jews, right?” In the@nastiest, most disgusting way and then hurriedly drove off after dropping us at a kosher restaurant in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Instances like these, even in New York City, are becoming a daily… pic.twitter.com/xgqtbKAefm

— Rabbi Shmuley (@RabbiShmuley) June 6, 2023

The post ‘OUT OF CONTROL’: This is what happened to a rabbi in New York City appeared first on World Israel News.

The Regavim NGO charged that “the IDF is the main supplier of ammunition” to Arab crime syndicates in the country.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Quick intelligence work led to the arrest of two Israeli Bedouin Wednesday suspected of making off with 26,000 bullets from a southern army base less than 24 hours earlier. All the ammunition was recovered in the operation.

Working together, the Shabak, IDF, police and Border Police found the Negev residents, members of the same family, in their village of Bir Hadaj.

The pair had managed to sneak into the Tze’elim base Tuesday night and break into one of the armories, damaging it in the process of getting away with the boxes of 5.56mm rifle bullets.

The massive theft was discovered in the morning during a routine patrol of the base, and a training curfew was immediately instated while the investigation began.

“Recently, the number of break-ins into the ground forces’ training center went down,” a military source told Walla. While noting that a section wasn’t fenced off and part of it consists of open firing ranges, he said that the IDF has recently instated new measures to protect bases from just such occurrences.

“And yet,” the source said, “they still broke in and stole from us.”

Tze’elim has been the target more than once for Bedouin thieves. In January 2021, they made off with 90,000 rifle bullets, which required several vehicles to carry it all away. Ten months later, another batch of tens of thousands of bullets were spirited away from one of its bunkers. Robberies similar in scope have also occurred in recent years on other bases and in other areas of the country as well.

Regavim, an NGO which primarily focuses on illegal Arab construction on state lands, said the IDF has become an unwitting accomplice to the wave of crime in the Arab sector.

“Bedouistan strikes again, making a mockery of the IDF and national security,” said the Regavim spokesperson in reaction to the theft. “Crime syndicates operating in the Negev and throughout Israel do not suffer from a shortage of weapons, but they do have a shortage of ammunition – and this is where the IDF comes in: The Israel Defense Forces is the main supplier of ammunition, and in this way is aiding and abetting the continued bloodshed in Israel’s Arab sector.”

“As long as Israeli authorities continue to treat criminals with kid gloves, failing to indict offenders or to enforce significant punishments, the mayhem that is destroying the Arab sector from within will continue,” the spokesperson added.

The post Thieves take 26,000 bullets from IDF base, 2 arrested appeared first on World Israel News.

Despite its economic shortcomings, Algeria’s geographic position, fast-growing population, and warm relations with all BRICS countries, makes its bid a strong one

Russia’s company on Svalbard, Trust Arktikugol, has recently entered into a strategic partnership with a university in Arkhangelsk. The company will actively develop a research station together with the BRICS states and needs support in this work, says the director

Astonishingly (although unsurprisingly), the NYT somehow managed to find the “evil hand of Putin” behind all this with claims that “in the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be ‘de-Nazified’ — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish”.

Non-oil trade between Iran and several BRICS nations has increased last year

Contradicting the latest narrative, Kiev’s officials have previously revealed their intention to destroy the dam.