Back in late September a friend forwarded a fund-raising pitch from the Action4Liberty group for the "Radical Agenda of Keith Ellison Tour." A screengrab from the email is at the top of this post. The accusations by an ex-romantic partner have morphed in the hands of this group into "sexual abuse," a dog whistle to stereotypes about black male sexuality.
But we digress.
We wrote aboutTrevor Loudon's earlier excursions into Greater Minnesota in 2015's Help Trevor Loudon, Central MN Tea Party Patriots speaker, fill in bios of dirty hippies and 2017's Commies, Muslims & terrorists, oh my: Loudon joins bush league in Little Falls & St. Cloud MN.
Loudon' outlandish conspiracy theories have been widely reported. Take the Washington Post's 2008 Obama as You've Never Known Him! and Right Wing Watch's 2017 post, CPAC Speaker: Leftists, Islamists And Russia (!) Are Working Together To Destroy Trump. Here in South Dakota, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader looked at a 2017 presentation in Speaker at Minnehaha GOP event says Congress infiltrated by traitors.
Jacobin's Branko Marcetic reports about Loudon's red-baiting in The Man Behind KeyWiki:
Bizarre cults. Anticommunist paranoia. Facebook stalking. Meet Trevor Loudon, founder of the antisocialist website KeyWiki. . . .
Mainstream US conservatism can be so unhinged at times that it’s easy to forget its core tenets are also shared by others around the globe. Take one such figure, New Zealand’s Trevor Loudon, the red-baiting, right-wing conspiracy theorist behind the websites KeyWiki and New Zeal, and several documentaries about armies of secret communists hiding in cupboard drawers across America and has probably stalked you and your friends on Facebook.
Since his humble beginnings as an anti-Soviet campaigner in the city of Christchurch, Loudon has made it his mission to expose the supposedly radical histories and beliefs of those in the liberal ruling class. Most recently, it’s led Loudon to spend hours trawling through Facebook vacuuming up information about whatever page any obscure leftist happens to have “liked.”
But Facebook posts and dank memes, it turns out, are only the beginnings of a dark conspiracy that stretches beyond conventional logic itself. If you’ve ever suspected that centrist Democrats are only kowtowing to their corporate overlords and torpedoing any minor attempt at left-wing reform as part of a long-term plan to establish one-party communist rule in the US, then Trevor Loudon has a story for you. . . .
According to Loudon, he first became interested in politics when in 1984, a “socialist Labour government” in New Zealand banned nuclear warships from the country, scuttling a military alliance with the US. It was all part of an effort, he explains, “to make Soviet designed policies into Labor [sic] Party policies, and consequently New Zealand law.” (History has not yet answered why the Soviets’ next move was to direct their socialist Labour puppets toward an orgy of free-market economic reforms.)
Even without this mangling of basic history, Loudon’s origin story is a little more complex. After growing up in a Labour-voting household, Loudon became politically active in the 1970s and 1980s through a Christchurch-based cult called Zenith Applied Philosophy (ZAP), best described as an unholy cross between Eastern mysticism, Scientology, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. ...
Read the rest at Jacobin and weep tears of laughter. Perhaps our favorite conspiracy item in KeyWiki is that about a western Minnesota labor leader who was targeted by a parody blog and other sites maintained by a maverick organizer. The former site led to an especially embarrassing moment for the once-feared, now defunct Minnesota Democrats Exposed, as City Pages Hart Van Denburg reported in Luke Hellier issues mea culpa after linking Al Franken to a Communist Party parody site.
The other speaker, John Gilmore of Alpha News, is mentioned in a new report by ISAIAH and CAIR-MN (embedded below). Gilmore spoke in Little Falls on October 8, according to Action4Liberty's Facebook page.The photo above was posted on the page.
So who's paying for this tour of Minnesota's lovely regional cities that's organized by Action4Liberty?
The email announcing the tour asked for donations; Action4Liberty is registered with the Minnesota Secretary of State as a nonprofit.We couldn't find any filings for a charity with this name in the IRS's database, but the organization could still be in the process of establishing its status.
It also maintains a political committee (defined on page 7 here) that's registered with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board; committee information and filings can be viewed here. We didn't find a registration with the IRS in its political organization database. None of this implies that the organization has done anything wrong; these are offered simply as tools through which engaged citizens can learn more about organizations they may wish to support.
It's not possible to tell from the materials we're looking at whether the non-profit or the PAC is footing the bill for the events listed at exposingkeith.com. There's no disclosure on the email we saw, which suggests that the tour is sponsored by the non-profit. Should money contributed to the political committee be funding the tour, we'll know soon enough, as the Fifth Report of Receipts and Expenditures due -Pre-General-Election is due before the end of October.*
Who has funded the PAC so far? One might reason that contributions to the PAC might signal who the friends of the non-profit might be. Action4Liberty PAC's financial summary notes that so far in 2018, the committee received $40,000 in contributions. Here's a screengrab of the source from the September report:
The candidate to whom Action4Liberty PAC was most generous? Keith Ellison's Republican opponent, Doug Wardlow, whose committee received a $2500 check--while the PAC spent $11,977.63 on independent expenditures on his behalf. Combined, that's more than the $12,222.07 in independent expenditures Action4Liberty PAC spent supporting Jeff Johnson's bid for governor.
So what's the connection to the propaganda mill? The report, Minnesota's Anti-Muslim Propaganda Mill, notes:
The first section of this report sketches a road map of the blogs, think tanks, individuals and institutions most closely connected to the propaganda network built around two Minnesota nonprofits: the Freedom Club and the Center of the American Experiment.
What is the Freedom Club? According to the report:
The Freedom Club is an exclusive organization founded by Republican super-donor Robert Cummins. Their events (such as the one where Horowitz spoke) are closed to non-members, and membership starts at $3000. According to their website, their membership consists of “CEO’s, business owners, attorneys, accountants, entrepreneurs, bankers, civic leaders and more.”
Notable members of their board of directors include . . . Robert Cummins, who is the president and CEO of Primera Technology. Their executive director is Alex Kharam. Cummins founded and is the primary funder for Freedom Club.. . .
Alex Kharam is the full-time executive director of Freedom Club, the manager of conservative political consulting firm The Greenbrier Group,and president of the right-wing blog Alpha News since its founding in 2015.
The latest report can be found here. In addition to contributions to Freedom Club by Cummins' wife:
there is a contribution from Philip Lindau to Freedom Club:
In short, two of the three generous friends of Action4Liberty PAC are the founder of the Freedom Club and a mutual donor, while Cummins' spouse is the Freedom Club's most generous 2018 contributor.
Read more about the network in the report by Logan Carroll, ISAIAH and CAIR-MN:
The Propaganda Mill uploaded by Sally Jo Sorensen on Scribd
*Correction: Earlier versions of this post pointed to a different reporting period. We apologize for the error.
Screengrabs: From an email and campaign finance reports.
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