Who Profits When Cities Burn? ActBlue, That's Who.

What would you call an organization that collects money from the public and distributes it to organizations that fund riots that result in billions of dollars in damages, that transfer the money to bail out criminals who ultimately kill and victimize innocent Americans, that support terrorist organizations and that pay for people that engage in domestic terrorism within the United States?

Certainly, you would refer to them by a variety of names. Yet you would at the very least call them criminals.

What I have described is a mainstream organization presently operating in the open in the United States that has not experienced any consequences for its actions in the decades that it has been in operation. It is not a fictitious organization pulled from the pages of a comic book. No, it's real. It's ActBlue, the primary Democratic Party fundraising juggernaut that collects billions of dollars in donations annually from the public, distributes the funds and retains a 3.95% processing fee.

Contributing to a candidate, political action committee or other advocacy or not-for-profit organization is a relatively simple process. Just provide your payment information and address, and you can donate immediately. However, this presents a problem for which ActBlue has been subjected to considerable scrutiny.

Is ActBlue vetting and verifying the accuracy of the information?

Donations to political campaigns by foreign nationals (individuals who are either not U.S. citizens or who have not been lawfully permitted to reside in the United States) are explicitly prohibited by federal law. ActBlue's seemingly only defense against this is the requirement of an address and a text section below the payment information section that outlines the rules, including the requirement that the individual be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Thus, the only requirement for donating is to provide the amount, payment information and address.

This has led to the attorneys general of numerous states submitting a letter to the Federal Election Commission and ActBlue, requesting information regarding the platform's verification of donors' information. ActBlue's systems may very well facilitate straw donations by foreign nationals. In addition, it may be effortless to add a fictitious address, though this is not yet known.

Donations through ActBlue have been made to organizations that have engaged in legally questionable activities. For example, Black Lives Matter (which decimated Minneapolis in 2020), various Palestinian groups that have supported Hamas (a designated terrorist organization), and the current Tesla protests, in which organizations being funded through ActBlue have allegedly paid not only for widespread protests against Tesla but also to instigate domestic terrorism through firebombing Teslas in an attempt to influence the government.

In 2020, the George Floyd riots, for instance, resulted in approximately $2 billion in damages and the destruction of Minneapolis. ActBlue was responsible for a large part of the funding for the organization that organized the riots. In the past few years, ActBlue donations have been used to finance pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas encampments on major college campuses. ActBlue has also been responsible for raising money for organizations that bailed out hundreds -- potentially thousands -- of violent criminals from prison. In a recent incident, for example, a violent man in Texas was released on bail by an organization funded using ActBlue. The man subsequently engaged in a shooting spree across the state that resulted in six deaths along with injuries to three other people.

Meanwhile, ActBlue reaped and is reaping substantial profits from the financing of terrorist-supporting organizations, the killing and looting of innocent Americans, and the destruction of cities and small businesses.

Who else could get away with that?

Top officials at ActBlue seem to think that not even they can get away with it for much longer. At least seven top ActBlue officials recently resigned following accusations that its fundraising platform is permitting unlawful financial contributions.

Democratic organizations are notorious for engaging in unlawful and harmful political activities. Greenpeace, an organization that maintains a voter action page on ActBlue, successfully advocated to stop the production of golden rice, a genetically modified rice rich in vitamin A. This rice was created to be distributed to African and Asian nations, whose populations notoriously suffer from vitamin A deficiency. In Africa alone, thousands of children die annually as a result of blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.

A win for the environment.

To continue the pain, a CNN investigation conducted last year revealed that ActBlue and WinRed (the Republican equivalent) have been exploiting the information provided by elderly donors to send misleading unsolicited text messages and emails, purportedly from the candidates themselves. This has resulted in the deception of elderly people who are lonely or have dementia into donating more and more to their causes.

In one case, an elderly man innocently contributed $80,000 to then-candidate Donald Trump and other Republicans, citing the "nice" messages Trump's son sent to him (the messages were automated, targeted, sent to thousands simultaneously, and likely written by a campaign staffer).

Studies have demonstrated that the elderly are more susceptible to personalized requests for donations, particularly when they receive text messages that appear to originate from candidates and request additional contributions.

So how many foreign nationals have contributed to democratic organizations that disrupt and cause internal division in the United States? How much foreign influence is being directly caused by ActBlue and other similar online platforms within the United States, right under our noses? We may never know. But what we do know is that it can happen -- and likely is happening -- and ActBlue is seemingly doing nothing to stop it.

And that is the most frightening prospect of all.

Armstrong Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast owner of the year. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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