Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
Eric O’Keefe is the director of Wisconsin Club for Growth. He has ties to Robert Mercer, who funds Breitbart News, as well as the Koch network of billionaire rightwing funders.
As raucous public demonstrators take to the streets in Madison and other state capitals to protest stay-at-home orders of Democratic governors to gain control over a deadly pandemic, no one should mistake all that noise for a growing grassroots movement of citizens desperate to throw off a government-imposed quarantine.
Just the opposite. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans—95% of Democrats and nearly 70% of Republicans—have a healthy fear of the rising coronavirus death toll and support stay-at-home orders. A majority in both parties believe public health and the nation’s economy are in much greater danger from resuming business as usual too quickly than from reopening too slowly.
So who’s behind all those mass demonstrations openly defying social distancing practices to stop the spread of COVID-19 and engaging in intimidating and offensive behavior such as carrying assault weapons and the occasional Confederate flag? No surprise, many of the groups organizing those demonstrations are funded by the same rightwing billionaires who have financed the extreme rightwing takeover of the Republican Party in recent years.
Toxic Breitbart
That includes billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the principal funders of Breitbart News and its extremist chairman Steve Bannon who was installed as President Trump’s chief political strategist after he was elected with major funding from the Mercers. Convention of States, another Mercer project promoting a rightwing rewrite of the U.S. Constitution, has funded online advertising promoting the demonstrations against Democratic governors.
The protests also are financially supported by Eric O’Keefe, director of Wisconsin Club for Growth, with ties to both the Mercers and the Koch network of billionaire rightwing funders. The Koch-funded Club for Growth was the focus of a two-year John Doe criminal investigation into whether it had illegally coordinated spending of millions of dollars in campaign contributions with Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Four Republican-backed justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who themselves had received millions of dollars in campaign support from Wisconsin Club for Growth, shut down the investigation in 2015 ruling it wasn’t illegal in Wisconsin for “dark money” groups with anonymous donors to coordinate spending with candidates who can’t legally keep their donors anonymous.
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O’Keefe helped manage the late David Koch’s campaign for the vice presidency on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980. He’s also board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Mercers’ Convention of States project organizing the stay-at-home protests.
To Hell with Milwaukee
O’Keefe gave away the divisive Republican strategy underlying the protests when he defended them publicly, saying, “To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City or, in some sense, Milwaukee, is draconian.” For years, a basic political strategy of Wisconsin Republicans has been to pit rural white voters against Democratic policies favoring Milwaukee where black people live. It’s particularly cruel to dismiss the higher death rates among African Americans from COVID-19 as something that shouldn’t be of any concern to small town whites. Then O’Keefe pushed a few more bigotry buttons by somehow linking Milwaukee to New York City with even more varieties of dark-skinned minorities and all those New York Jews.
Billionaire-funded rightwing extremists have been poisoning state and national politics for so long they deserve the competition they’re starting to get from online scammers. The Washington Post exposed the Dorr brothers—Ben, Chris, Aaron and Matthew—creators of Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine as well as Minnesotans, New Yorkers, Ohioans and Pennsylvanians, all Against Excessive Quarantine. Apparently, it’s amazing how much money you can make online by charging for memberships in these groups and then selling the mailing lists to others looking for gullible dupes.
President Trump is one of the greatest all-time online political scammers, of course, but lately he’s been sinking into self-parody by peddling the idea of injecting disinfectants into human beings to kill off the coronavirus once and for all. Capitalized presidential tweets have become the online equivalent of a crazed lunatic shouting incoherently at passersby on a busy city street: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!”
Safely Reopening the Economy
All of those states, along with Wisconsin, already have been liberated. They’ve exercised their right to vote in a democracy to elect Democratic governors who are wisely following the guidelines of Trump’s own medical experts to protect the lives of their citizens during the deadliest public health pandemic in our lifetimes.
Trump isn’t bright enough to understand Democratic governors are his best friends. They are the ones taking responsibility to reduce the horrific death rate that will define his presidency. Trump has made that more difficult with his failure to provide adequate national testing. This week the death toll will surpass the U.S. fatalities in the Vietnam War.
A handful of foolish Republican governors eager to do Trump’s bidding will not reopen the American economy. Only the American people can do that when they can be confident it’s safe to do so.
