The Trump campaign was the Wells Fargo of political fundraising, using deceptive practices to empty donors bank accounts. 1/ nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/…
Trump campaign changed the donor default to a recurring donation and made it difficult to understand.
Graph of refunds shows a campaign that made a deliberate decision to extract resources that donors did not want to give. Had to issue 530K refunds worth $64M. 2/
The Trump campaign boasted about their digital fundraising. Their secret sauce was changing donation defaults in opaque and deceptive ways.
As the Trump campaign became more desperate they resorted to more and more deceptive fine print to extract more resources from supporters. The evolution of check boxes from March to October.
It is easy to suggest that treating donors like creditors, investors or contractors you stiff payment on is pure Trumpism. But the GOP leadership has embraced WInRed, the company that employed the deceptive fundraising practices to rip off Republican donors.
Pretty obvious incentive problems here: 1/ For-profit company has big incentive to maximize volume of funds it raises 2/ Gets paid even when it takes money donors did not intend to give 3/ No offsetting incentive not to upset donors.
Good for WinRed, but seems bad for the GOP.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The connections are pretty clear. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society helped bankroll the work of Ginni Thomas. He also arranged for Clarence Thomas to attend Koch fundraisers. propublica.org/article/claren…
The shared purpose of Leonard Leo, Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas and the Koch network was to put right-wing judges on the court. And Clarence Thomas used his public position on the court to raise money for that.
Clarence Thomas used to support the Chevron doctrine, which allows delegation to administrative expertise. But the people who fund the Koch network can't buy off administrators, so they want to remove their influence from the process. Now Thomas agrees with the donors.
Also this guy: young people today can't afford a house because they occasionally buy new clothes
If the people @FinancialReview care for free speech at all, they will do the decent thing and allow replies to this tweet, allowing a full and frank exchange of views.
America has 22 times the firearm homicide rates as the European Union.
We are less safe and less free because of how available guns are in this country. healthdata.org/news-events/in…
America makes up about 15% of gun homicides, and together with five other countries constitutes half of gun homicides in the world. vox.com/2018/8/29/1779…
The reason more people in America are dying from guns is because there are more guns in America.
America is the only country with more guns than people. cnn.com/2021/11/26/wor…
New, from me: I wrote about how the emerging debacle at New College (one-third of faculty gone, students can't find classes, housed in airport hotels) reflects the incompetence of populists like DeSantis.
Competence, the ability to perform organizational core tasks, is an underrated quality. It is an especially overlooked quality by people who value other things, like ideological goals, or believe that existing institutions are corrupt, or who have never actually run things.
Fuck Around (left, celebrating the firing of a faculty who criticized the Regents)
and
Find Out: (right, soliciting faculty applications because you don't have enough to teach classes - one-third have left for some reason).
The DeSantis takeover of New College was meant to offer a model of a conservative-run higher ed.
The result is chaos, which is what happens when incompetent people who don't actually care about organizational mission take over public services. insidehighered.com/news/students/…
The NY Times recently featured Chris Rufo to explain how DEI was undermining liberal education.
You know what actually undermines a liberal education?
Losing one-third of faculty.
Not offering core classes to students.
Raging incompetence and blind indifference.
Rufo is seeking to personally recruit replacements. Which is completely at odds with what university trustees are supposed to do. No way that could go wrong, right?
From the internal Texas A&M reports: it was A&M Regents who signaled their opposition to McElroy, at which point the university figured out they would not tenure her.
Seems like the Regents cost A&M $1M. Nice job.
: ... tamus.edu/wp-content/up
Not great when a university President is saying "I'm assuming all texts were deleted" and then tells faculty she was not involved in hiring process. (She has since resigned).