First Quarter Fundraising; Individual GOP Donors Reward the Party's Kooks

Most corporations are withholding donations to politicians who questioned the 2020 election results or are engaged in voter suppression efforts. Large public companies don't want to be associated with right-wing lunacy, and many are simply tired of the GOP's race-baiting, culture wars nonsense.

However, some of the worst kooks in the Republican Party are successfully fundraising from large numbers of individual donors. Unfortunately, such contributions reward bad, racist, undemocratic behavior and may convince more right-wing politicians to become the next star in the GOP's conspiracy theory reality show.

Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced last week that her reelection committee raised a whopping $3.2 million in the first quarter of the year, despite what some might charitably call "erratic" behavior. The campaign reported that she raised the money from about 100,000 individual donors. She is a frightening mess of an individual that even many of her GOP colleagues aren't thrilled with.

Illuminate: "Newly elected Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of GA is becoming the post-Trump face of the GOP by being just a bit more crazy than her colleagues, and that is saying something. Her theory seems to be that there just isn't any hoax too nuts for the Trumpists in her party."

New York Times: "The Georgia freshman is best known for endorsing QAnon, the right-wing movement convinced of the fiction that Donald Trump is a messiah sent to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshiping, child-abusing, deep-state villains. But this is just one of the bizarre lies she has peddled. Her greatest hits include promoting the conspiracy theory that blames the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire in California on a space laser controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family, suggesting the Obama administration used its MS-13 “henchmen” to murder a Democratic National Committee staff member and floating the idea that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed. She has dabbled in 9/11 Trutherism and contended that various school shootings were false-flag operations. She also traffics in racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim talk."

On the Senate side, Missouri's Josh Hawley raised more than $3 million during the same three month period, again proving that the GOP's race down the rabbit hole leads to big fundraising success. Hawley was Trump's biggest "election fraud" champion in the Senate, and many in Congress blame him for inciting the attack on the Capital. Like Greene, most of Hawley's loot came from small donors.

Greene and Hawley raised far more money than their more mainstream GOP colleagues so the unfortunate result of their success is that it sends the worst possible message; GOP donors aren't interested in calm deliberation and compromise. They want raw meat and conspiracy theories and they will likely get much more of both.

#news #politics

By: Don Lam & Curated Content