Fascism is on the ballot in 2024. Donald Trump has made no bones about that, and should he fail to get the GOP nomination, the Heritage Foundation is creating its “Agenda 47” to make sure the next Republican president has a fascist gameplan ready anyway. The stakes couldn’t be higher for democracy, but the supposedly “centrist” No Labels is still readying a spoiler campaign.
Despite attempts to get a No Labels ticket on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, No Labels isn’t an actual political party. It’s a political nonprofit, and it is exploiting that status to the max by raking in millions of dollars of dark money, with most of its donors undisclosed. Some of the high-profile donors are known—and notorious. For example, Harlan Crow, best buddy and benefactor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has hosted fundraisers for the group and donated more than $130,000 of his own cash.
While we don’t know where a lot of No Labels’ money is coming from, The Daily Beast got hold of the group’s tax forms. We now have a window into where a big chunk of that dough is going: toward paying its directors’ lavish salaries. Nancy Jacobson, the group’s CEO, made $300,000 last year despite not having received a salary in 2021.
Their former “chief strategist,” Mark Halperin, earned $336,879 in 2022, a raise from $240,753 in 2021. And yes, it is that Mark Halperin we’re talking about, the former journalist fired from his last journalism gig at NBC after at least a dozen women publicly accused him of sexual harassment and/or assault—allegations he did not deny. Just some context there on the No Labels ethos. Halperin left the organization earlier this year.
Then there are the co-executive directors, with Margaret White making $315,440 for No Labels last year and Elizabeth Morrison taking home $203,975. The next highest earners were Megan Shannon at $160,833 for her work as the VP of development and McKinley Scholtz, the deputy director, at $134,723.
That’s $1.5 million going to the top six executives in the organization. The Daily Beast reports that No Labels has spent about $3 million on its efforts to appear on ballots nationwide. “Campaign finance experts said the group is going right up to the boundaries of a nonprofit compared to a traditional political party when it comes to spending on ballot access, which was around 25 percent of its spending last year,” The Daily Beast says. Jacobson claims the group has raised $60 million so far this year for the effort.
All of this suggests the group’s lofty rhetoric about this being just an “insurance project” to offer an alternative “Unity Ticket” that will unite right and left in a Biden/Trump election is bullshit. It’s about the money. It’s as cynical and political a ploy as you will ever witness.
There’s isn’t an electorate clamoring for this solution, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas pointed out on “Meet the Press” earlier this year.
No Labels says it’s standing up for an electorate that is fed up with “political leaders who fixate on yesterday’s hatreds and grievances instead of focusing on the future.” But when “yesterday’s hatreds and grievances” are literally rhetoric and plans lifted straight from Hitler and Mussolini, the future is in too much jeopardy for this kind of game.
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Republicans are challenging labor leaders to fights and allegedly physically assaulting one another. Donald Trump says he will abolish reproductive rights entirely and is openly calling for the extermination of his detractors, referring to them as “vermin” on Veterans Day. The Republican Party has emerged from its corruption cocoon as a full-blown fascist movement.