fake newspaper metric media

see timpone

List of miscellaneous fake news websites - Wikipedia

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exxonknews gmail 12 24

Who’s funding this ‘newspaper’ mailed to potential jurors in Greenpeace’s trial?

A dark money trail linked to pipeline company Energy Transfer could be behind a mysterious mailer targeting North Dakota residents in the lead-up to its major trial with Greenpeace.

The following piece was co-published by DeSmog and ExxonKnews.

In early September, fossil fuel executive and Donald Trump megadonor Kelcy Warren quietly made a large donation to a political action committee few people have ever heard of. Warren is CEO of Energy Transfer, the company behind the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline, which in 2016 faced thousands of protesters including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other opponents.

The timing is potentially significant because Warren made his $5 million donation to the super PAC called Turnout for America while his company pushed forward with a lawsuit against the nonprofit Greenpeace related to the Standing Rock protests.

Two weeks after receiving Warren’s contribution, Turnout for America paid $250,000 to Northern CB Corp. — an Illinois publishing and printing company — for “media services.”

One of the listed directors for Northern CB Corp. is Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman who owns Chicago-based company Metric Media, a Koch-linked network that runs more than 1,100 partisan websites masquerading as local news.

In October, residents in Morton County, where the Greenpeace trial is scheduled to take place, received a mailed publication called “Central ND News,” which featured articles decrying the Dakota Access protests and praising Energy Transfer. Central ND News is produced by Metric Media.

While news of this “weird” paper was first reported by Floodlight and the North Dakota News Cooperative, additional details related to Warren’s Super PAC donation are now being debated in the lawsuit itself.

Greenpeace is urging a North Dakota court to allow further investigation into who paid to send the publication attacking Dakota Access protestors to Morton County residents — and whether there was an attempt to exert “improper influence” over potential jurors in Energy Transfer’s favor.

“Given the importance of securing a fair and impartial jury … knowing who was directing these actions, to whom they directed the information, and why they did so are important issues to the fair administration of justice,” a Greenpeace brief shared with ExxonKnews and DeSmog reads.

A closely watched lawsuit

Energy Transfer’s $300 million lawsuit accuses the environmental group Greenpeace of unlawfully orchestrating protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, during which time hundreds of protestors were arrested near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation — including climate activists and Indigenous water protectors.

Energy Transfer, which worked with law enforcement agencies to curtail the protests and used an international security firm to surveil and shift public opinion about the company’s opponents, claims that Greenpeace waged an “unlawful, malicious, and coordinated attack” to damage and defame the pipeline and the company itself.

**According to Greenpeace USA, Energy Transfer is suing the group because it “dared to uplift the Indigenous-led opposition movement at Standing Rock.”

The lawsuit could have implications for whether the fossil fuel industry is able to silence protesters as it embarks on major expansions, including the buildout of new gas and carbon dioxide pipelines, Gulf Coast LNG facilities, and petrochemical infrastructure. Experts and advocates say the case has all the hallmarks of a SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation — a larger legal tactic fossil fuel companies have been using to suppress dissent and drain their opposition of resources and time.

As the February 2025 trial draws near in the closely watched case, Greenpeace is now asking a state district court to grant an emergency motion to reopen discovery in the case, which would allow the environmental group to get more information about who funded the mailer to North Dakota residents.

In its new court filing, Greenpeace alleges that “there may have been improper influence over potential Morton County jurors through direct mailers containing negative reporting about Standing Rock protests that took place eight years ago, and benefits which Energy Transfer conferred on the local community six years ago.”

Greenpeace cites new details indicating that Kelcy Warren’s donation came around the same time as a surge of coverage from Central ND News targeting the Dakota Access protests. Central ND News began running a series on its website in August, called “On This Date in 2016.” The series contained six articles in August, three of which accused protestors of “unlawful” activities in their headlines. Subsequent articles in the series appeared a few times each month up until this week. There is no record of the paper covering those protests before this year.

The same day Turnout for America paid the Illinois publishing company, Central ND News published a story praising a donation that Energy Transfer made to a university in North Dakota six years ago. That story, written by C.D. Marsden (a name that Floodlight first found yields no results in a Google search), was featured in the October newspaper delivered to Morton County residents’ homes, juxtaposed with stories about Dakota Access pipeline protestors.

The 12-page paper included those stories in a section called “This Month in History: October 2016,” featuring one article titled “Area schools locked down as authorities respond to pipeline protests.” Another recounts the details of a felony arrest warrant accusing a pipeline protestor of charging a police officer on horseback.

“The purpose of that publication is quite clearly to remind people about what was happening eight years ago,” a lawyer for Greenpeace, Everett Jack, told the court at a December 9 hearing requesting the reopening of discovery. “We should be entitled to find out who made that decision.”

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One of Greenpeace’s lawyers — Derrick Braaten, who resides in Mandan, a city in Morton County — received the Central ND News at his home in October. The paper doesn’t appear to have any physical presence in North Dakota — it directed readers to the outlet’s website, and didn’t include any local advertisements, according to Greenpeace.*

Jack told Southwest Judicial District Court Judge James Gion that reopening discovery would allow Greenpeace’s attorneys to question the Texas-based printing company that sent the newspaper, FMC Printing. The group would seek to subpoena FMC Printing to determine whether the mailer was targeted only to Morton County residents, who directed that the mailer be sent there, and why. Depending on the results of that investigation, Greenpeace would consider requesting a change in venue for the trial.

“We’re filing this motion and seeking this discovery because I think this court would agree there’s nothing more sacred in the legal system than the right to a fair, impartial jury, and every lawyer knows that direct efforts to influenc[e] the jury pool are not okay,” Jack said.

‘Playing both sides’

Greenpeace has been fighting varying iterations of Energy Transfer’s case — which was originally filed under state and federal racketeering charges — for eight years, with individual Indigenous protestors and journalists also brought into the mix. This week, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard an appeal from Energy Transfer in its attempts to subpoena journalists who reported on the protests at Standing Rock, seeking to force them to produce confidential, unpublished material.

The Dakota Access pipeline began operating through North Dakota in 2017 after an executive action from then-President Trump. The pipeline, which protestors warned would threaten water supplies, sacred sites, and the climate, leaked 5 times in its first year of operation alone.

This fall, the day before the October mailing was sent, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a new lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arguing that the pipeline is operating illegally and should be shut down. Energy Transfer CEO Warren gave $5 million in campaign donations to Trump, who recently promised “fully expedited approvals and permits” to companies who invest $1 billion in the U.S.

:{Energy Transfer’s case, originally filed by the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres (long-time lawyers for Donald Trump), was taken over in 2023 by Gibson Dunn, a law firm with a record of “playing both sides” of the First Amendment on behalf of its corporate clients. }:{:Gibson Dunn}: lawyer Trey Cox represented Energy Transfer in its opposition to Greenpeace’s motion this week, arguing that juror questionnaires are the appropriate method to ensure a fair trial — and that whether or not Morton County residents received or read the newspaper was irrelevant.

ND Central News, he said, was a local newspaper that existed before the mailer was sent, and was simply covering matters involving a high-profile trial. Cox accused Greenpeace of trying to delay the trial date (which Greenpeace denied), and said its motion did not have “any basis in law or in fact.”

Energy Transfer, Metric Media, and Trey Cox did not respond to requests for comment.

“We don’t have any evidence that this newspaper in any way prejudiced potential jurors,” Cox told the court.

===

Fueling Disinformation

Fossil fuel interests are working to kill solar in one Ohio county. The hometown newspaper is helping.

A retired gas industry executive, a shadowy 'grassroots' group and a controversial media company are spreading misinformation while turning residents against a proposed solar farm — and each other

Miranda Green/Floodlight, Jennifer Smith Richards/ProPublica, Priyanjana Bengani/Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Oct 8, 2024 — 17 min read

Rich Piar farms soybeans in Knox County, Ohio. “We try to be good stewards of the ground,” he said. The solar project he hopes will be built on his land, “from my research, is a decent thing. We have electric power plants shutting down, coal fire plants. We need energy.” (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

Co-published with*ProPublica*, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.*Sign up for Dispatches*, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.

Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.

An anti-solar group sent text messages to residents of Knox County, Ohio urging them to “stop the solar invasion.”

To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Rural Knox County, Ohio, is home to extensive farmland and has deep ties to the gas industry. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

In Mount Vernon, a city of 17,000 where the local university named its new sports complex CH4 after the chemical formula for methane, a variety of tactics have been deployed simultaneously, creating an anti-solar echo chamber.

Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s CH4 Stadium was partially funded by Ariel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Ariel Corporation, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors.(Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

Residents are bombarded with dubious claims: Solar panels are toxic. Their construction depletes the soil and floods fields and depresses home values. China is using them to invade. The campaign has stoked their skepticism and ignited their passions. It intensified the debate in a conservative county that prizes its roots in the gas industry.

Bright yellow “No Industrial Solar” yard signs have sprung up everywhere, competing with a smattering of green “Yes Solar” ones. Citizens packed local government meetings. More than 4,000 public comments, both for and against, were filed with the state regulator that will decide if the solar project can be built — triple the number for any previous solar project in Ohio. And all those opinions have drowned out the voices of the nine landowners, mostly farmers, who’ve signed leases with Frasier’s developer and for whom a total of about $60 million is at stake.

“People are so radicalized and they’re not thinking clearly,” said Rich Piar, a third-generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his 1,650 acres to Open Road Renewables, the Texas-based company developing the Frasier Solar project.

A plaque on the Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s CH4 Stadium explains that, like the chemical bonds in methane, the bond between the university and Ariel is strong. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

Politicians who didn’t forcefully denounce the solar project were attacked in Mount Vernon News stories. Thom Collier, a long-serving Republican on the county commission who thinks landowners should be able to choose whether to use their property for solar infrastructure, ultimately lost his reelection bid after a barrage of misleading coverage about his stance on solar.

“I pin this on one or two people from Ariel and some close friends that they have,” Collier said of the anti-solar offensive. “They determined it didn’t matter how much money it would take, they were going to fight this and make it ugly, and they have.”

The Yellowbud Solar project in Pickaway County, Ohio, shown in 2022, became operational last year. It is about 90 miles southwest of Knox County. (Dan Gearino / Inside Climate News)

‘They want everybody to buy gas’

Just 20 days after Knox Smart Development was registered as an LLC in Ohio, the anti-solar group hosted a town hall at a historic Georgian revival theater in Mount Vernon with 1,000 red velvet seats. Attendees were offered free food and alcohol.

The November 2023 event centered on a presentation from Steve Goreham, who argues global warming is natural and who is the author of several books, including “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”

The Mount Vernon News’ new owners opened an office in the Woodward Opera House, a historic downtown building that the Ariel Foundation helped renovate. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

“When I think of a town hall meeting, I think of a meeting where everybody from the community can go, everybody has their say. That’s not how their meeting was,” said Kathy Gamble, who said organizers only reluctantly agreed to let her in. She’s pro-solar and not quiet about it.

The town hall established Knox Smart Development as a leading voice against the Frasier Solar project. The group calls itself a simple grassroots defender of Knox County.

It isn’t.

The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.

And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.

Ariel Corporation expanded in 2017, adding a training center for employees and customers near its headquarters in Mount Vernon, Ohio. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

The group’s founder, Jared Yost, said in an email that Rastin has not tried to steer its activism. “As a local resident, I believe he should be allowed to donate to whatever cause he aligns with, regardless of his former employment, and to state otherwise is to suggest Mr. Rastin should be censored,” Yost wrote in an email. He said the group relies on volunteers and “our intentions are genuine.”

He added: “The oil and gas industry is not involved in our fight.”

Jared Yost, founder of Knox Smart Development, testifies in August during an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing about his group’s opposition to the Frasier Solar project.(Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

The town hall event headliner, Goreham, said he appeared as a favor to Rastin and Wright. In 2019, he had dinner with the couple when Goreham and his wife were passing through town from Illinois on a road trip to their second home in Virginia Beach. Goreham said that he and Rastin connected over their mutual feelings on the benefits of gas. He said he was glad to accept the invitation to speak at the anti-Frasier Solar event.

“First off, it’s in his county there. Mount Vernon is his city where he lives and where they are based,” said Goreham. “They’re pretty much opposed to renewables and they want everybody to buy gas. That’s their business.”

Goreham says he wasn’t paid to speak, but Wright bought 200 copies of his latest book, “Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure,” which warns about a net-zero-emissions agenda that will cause energy grids to fail. Local officials were given copies of the book that included a personal note from Wright: “Hello! Given the significant misinformation surrounding solar and wind arrays, I bought you this book that really lays out the facts.” She signed the note “Karen Wright, Chairman — Ariel Corporation.”

Shortly after the group was formed, Knox Smart Development’s “No Solar” ads became a fixture on the Mount Vernon News website and in the paper.

‘You believe people’

The Mount Vernon News had been owned by the same family since 1939, and for decades it chronicled local doings from city council meetings to the county fair.

At its height in the early 2000s, before newspapers started hemorrhaging advertising revenue and readers, the News employed about 15 full-time local reporters. An orange Maine coon cat named Scoop roamed the newsroom.

But by 2020, the News was barely hanging on. Its reporters were still using clunky 20-year-old computers. The back wall of the building was falling down and needed $250,000 in repairs. Kay Culbertson, who owned both the paper and the building, said that she knew it was time to sell. Paying for the repairs would be impossible; even making payroll was a stretch.

The former Mount Vernon News building, home to the paper since 1939, sits empty. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

An acquaintance of Culberston’s connected her with Metric Media, part of an eight-company network operating more than 1,100 online local news sites. These sites have been described by media researchers and journalists as “pink slime,” named for a filler in processed meat. The final product looks natural, but it’s been tampered with.

A Syracuse University researcher concluded in a journal article published in February that :{sites like Metric’s “that seem like original news outlets and that appeal to local identity are filling the void” left by the decline of local news. And The Washington Post reported last year that Republican campaigns requested customized news stories that appeared on Metric-owned sites.}:

Both conservative and liberal pink slime sites exist. But Metric is run by Brian Timpone, an Illinois-based former broadcast reporter who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to conservative campaigns and causes. Timpone’s ventures have been criticized for using foreign-based writers to produce material. Some also have been accused of plagiarism and fabricating quotes. Timpone has blamed the problems on foreign writers providing content, and he apologized to readers.

Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. (Political groups that organize as nonprofits do not have to disclose donors, which is why they’re called “dark money.”)

DonorsTrust CEO and President Lawson R. Bader said in an email that the organization makes about 4,000 grants a year and that it does not dictate how those donations are spent.

Timpone responded to a request for an interview by writing, “We at the Mount Vernon News are now also working on a story — about Pro Publica and Floodlight’s efforts to promote taxpayer-funded ‘solar energy’ businesses in Central Ohio.” He did not respond to detailed questions.

But in interviews, he has said his business keeps local news alive when many outlets are scaling back or shutting down. Timpone told the Deseret News in Utah that his sites have no political leaning and are “data-driven and fact-centric.”

Research and news investigations have found that Timpone’s publications tend to champion conservative causes and politicians; they often are linked to mysterious newspapers distributed during key elections.

Culbertson and assistant publisher Liz Lutwick said in an interview that they knew little about Metric Media before the sale. But the company’s promises sounded good and, Lutwick said, “You believe people.”

“They were going to keep everything the same for a while. Lo and behold, they didn’t,” Culbertson said.

Metric paid at least $1 million for the Mount Vernon News, the first time it had purchased an established news organization printing a local paper. When the new owners visited the paper after the sale, they told the staff they’d stop printing every day and would no longer provide benefits; instead, employees would become contractors. Half the staff quit on the spot.

“It was awful. You feel like you’ve betrayed people,” Culbertson said.

‘We call it the Solar Times’

Today, the Mount Vernon News only publishes once a week and has no local reporters or photographers.

“It’s obvious when you read the stories, either they’re AI-generated or they’re written by somebody who’s sitting in an office in Chicago who has never been here,” said Bill Davis, a sports editor who said he worked at the paper from 2010 to 2019.

Since Metric took over, only 11% of stories credited the work to authors working for Metric or its sister companies. Most of what it publishes are press releases or content submitted by companies and community groups, according to an analysis by the Tow Center, ProPublica and Floodlight.

After the sale, residents said they could no longer get timely obituaries — people were buried by the time funeral announcements were published — but they could read a lot about endangered farmland and concerns that the sun’s reflection off solar panels could blind nearby pilots.

Even Mount Vernon’s mayor, who was once a sports reporter at the paper, said he stopped reading it. Tanner Salyers, a former Mount Vernon city council member who now oversees public safety for the city, said quality dropped after the sale. “Then Frasier kicked up and they were like, ‘No more news.’ We call it the Solar Times.”

A summer issue of the Mount Vernon News on the floor of the paper’s business office, where one local employee now works. There are no local reporters or photographers. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica).

Over the last 12 months, the paper has published at least 52 online news stories on solar energy — 42 of them about the Frasier proposal, the analysis found. Of the 40 print editions published this year, 17 have featured front-page stories about solar. And though the paper has occasionally run a pro-solar letter to the editor, nearly all of the stories slanted anti-solar, according to an analysis of coverage by Floodlight, ProPublica and the Tow Center.

The paper began publishing a weekly opinion column called “Afternoon TEA” — TEA being an acronym for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money gas advocacy group Rastin leads.

The columns extolled the superiority of gas as a fuel source.

It isn’t clear if The Empowerment Alliance paid the Mount Vernon News to run the “Afternoon TEA” columns.

But tax filings show that since 2020 The Empowerment Alliance has spent at least $6.3 million on a “public education campaign,” which included publishing “Afternoon TEA.” The goal was to promote “the importance of natural gas to the economy and national energy independence.”

One of The Empowerment Alliance’s stated goals is “fighting the nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields.” It has financed online advertisements attacking President Joe Biden’s energy policies and spearheaded an Ohio bill that defined gas as a “green” fuel source.

Half of the Frasier stories published in the Mount Vernon News over the past year have mentioned Knox Smart Development, the anti-solar group linked to Rastin. Articles often quoted people or cited work from a Koch-backed think tank, The Buckeye Institute, but did not interview Frasier or farmers willing to lease land to it.

The Buckeye Institute is part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks that has received millions in funding from organizations connected to the Koch family. Rastin’s wife has served as a director on the State Policy Network board, and in 2019 she gave it $700,000, according to a tax record that typically would’ve been redacted but was posted to a government site.

The Mount Vernon News and pro-gas political groups also were working to influence local elections. The text messages that boosted anti-solar candidates were from a conservative Ohio PAC tied to a group that ran a pro-gas campaign.

And, leading up to the primary, a newspaper called the Ohio Energy Reporter was mailed to Knox County homes. The 8-page paper reprinted several Mount Vernon News stories on solar and featured other articles with headlines including “Ohio’s coming ‘solar trash wave’ ” and “Could the Texas Power Crisis happen in Ohio?”

The publication did not disclose its owners. The Floodlight, ProPublica and Tow Center investigation used source code from the website, its IP address and business mailing addresses to confirm that it is a product of the wider Metric Media network.

The stories the Mount Vernon News published began undermining politicians who were seen as insufficiently anti-solar and boosting the profiles of solar power’s outspoken critics.

In one article, the News accused Mount Vernon Mayor Matthew Starr of bowing to “energy activists” and pledging to try to remove natural gas from the city. It was not true. Starr was furious and asked the editors to take down the article, but they would not.

And in nearly a dozen stories that mentioned Collier, the county commissioner who was later ousted, the paper consistently misused a comment he’d given about newly placed solar panels at the county jail to falsely insinuate he supported the Frasier project.

Collier was never interviewed for those stories. Yet the paper ran a story devoted entirely to anti-solar commissioner candidate Drenda Keesee, a megachurch pastor who’d never run for office before; the article said she had “emerged as a vocal opponent of solar projects encroaching on the community.” Keesee, whose property would border a portion of the solar site, was the only source in the story.

She won the primary against Collier and is unopposed in the November general election.

Drenda Keesee, right, is a pastor at Faith Life Church and a candidate for a seat on the Knox County Commission. Keesee, who’s running on an anti-solar platform, attended a Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in Columbus in August. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

‘You can’t eat solar panels’

For the community, the debate over solar has been passionate and persistent. What it hasn’t always been is civil. Yard signs have been stolen. Insults hurled. Middle fingers extended. Friendships frayed.

“Other than solar, we don’t have any problems with each other,” said Kathy Gamble, who runs the pro-solar group Knox County For Responsible Solar.

Many people in the community say they don’t view the debate through the lens of climate science or fossil fuels; they care about land rights and preserving rural life. Members of Preserve Knox County, an anti-solar group with several members whose land borders the proposed solar arrays, said they worry the solar project will scare off the sandhill cranes and bald eagles that visit their backyards.

Many members are distrustful of Biden’s renewable energy initiatives; they are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, who questions the scientific consensus that the climate is undergoing dangerous changes. They also don’t trust the solar developer’s promises to plant enough trees to block the panels from view. And they don’t want to lose the farmland that gives the area its agricultural identity.

Knox County residents Connie and Jim Boeshart, who live next to property where solar panels would be built if the Frasier Solar project is approved, attend an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in August. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

“You can’t eat solar panels,” said Jim Boeshart, whose home would be adjacent to solar arrays.

Keith Strait, a farmer who lives not far from Boeshart, agreed: “Let’s face it,” he said, pointing at the ground, “They’re not making any more of this. There will be a time when there won’t be any farm left. Where’re you going to get your food from?”

Keith Strait, a farmer in Knox County, said, “I don’t like it,” of the solar proposal. “They’re taking away a lot of farm ground.” (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

The farmers who want to lease their land feel their voices have been lost in the debate. For them, a 40-year land contract with Frasier Solar would be steady income. One farmer said he could make four times as much money per acre leasing to the solar project as he’d make renting to another farmer.

Rich Piar, the third-generation farmer, is looking to the solar panels as a retirement plan. He said he has no one to take over the operation when he retires, and he doesn’t think anyone should dictate what he does with his land or when he stops farming.

“Most farmers’ exit strategy is their health,” Piar said. “I don’t want to have that kind of predetermined exit strategy.” He went to one of the public meetings about Frasier but said it was so packed he didn’t get to speak until almost midnight.

Rich Piar stands near his cornfield in Knox County, Ohio. He is one of the local farmers who plans to lease his land for the Frasier Solar project. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica)

In August, the Ohio Power Siting Board, which will rule on whether the project can be built, held a final hearing to accept evidence from both sides. One of the attorneys who spoke on behalf of a farmer who is leasing land for the project was from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. (The Tow Center also is based at Columbia, but its work is separate.)

Frasier lawyers cross-examined Knox Smart Development spokesperson Jared Yost at the hearing, where he testified that Rastin, the retired Ariel executive, was one of the group’s biggest donors. To Open Road Renewables’ vice president of development, Craig Adair, the confirmation pierced the veil.

Everything changed, Adair said in an interview, “when The Empowerment Alliance decided to use its vast financial resources” to shape the debate in Knox County and in the Mount Vernon News.

Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, the company developing the Frasier Solar project, testifies at the Ohio Power Siting Board hearing on the project in August. (Sarahbeth Maney / ProPublica),

The News published two stories on the hearing but did not mention the public admission of Knox Smart Development’s ties to Rastin, the Ariel Corporation and The Empowerment Alliance.

The board’s decision is likely to take months.

In the meantime, construction has started at the old Mount Vernon News building, which is being turned into an academic hub for a local university. The building will be named after Rastin’s stepson, a former president of Ariel Corporation.

*Floodlight**is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

===

{{{ ===

https://www.alternet.org/gop-megadonor-citizen-ballot-initiatives/

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/foundation-government-accountability-democracy

an 6 23

no lnx

This GOP megadonor is funding efforts to 'derail citizen-led ballot initiatives': report

Alex Henderson June 23, 2023

Over the years, Illinois-based shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been major donors to the Republican Party. And these days, they have a preference for far-right MAGA candidates, including 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (who lost by double digits to Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro).

In 2023, The Guardian reports, Richard Uihlein has been a major funder of a Florida-based group known as theFoundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — who are trying to make it more difficult to get initiatives on ballots.

The Guardian's Brendan Fischer, in an article published June 23, reports, "These efforts are designed to derail citizen-led ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid. In effect, FGA and its allies seek to give 41 percent of the voting population an effective veto over the wishes of the other 59 percent."

READ MORE: 'A stark illustration of our broken campaign finance system': Here's how rich mega-doners hacked US politics

Fischer notes that in "at least four states," FGA has "lobbied or testified in favor of changing ballot initiative rules to enshrine minority rule."

He then explains, "The latest fight is in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers last month passed a measure requiring future constitutional amendments to receive at least 60 percent support from voters — rather than a simple majority — and that would make it harder for proposed amendments to make it on to the ballot. Ohioans will now vote in August on whether to approve the higher thresholds…. FGA's tactics in Ohio echo those used previously — and unsuccessfully — in Arkansas and South Dakota."

In 2021, Fischer reports, FGA "issued a legal memo arguing for the constitutionality of a 60 percent requirement for enacting ballot initiatives, and a report decrying how voters in red states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska had approved Medicaid expansion through the ballot initiative process."

READ MORE: Appeals court dismisses GOP megadonor’s lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke: report

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

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Opportunities Solutions Project

Travis N. Taylor, of Hamilton County, holds a PhD in political science and serves as a visiting fellow with the Opportunity Solutions Project (OSP). The Florida-based organization isnon-partisan but describes its mission as “advocating for public policies based on the principles of free enterprise.”

OSP has had an in-state visiting fellow advocate for raising requirements to pass constitutional amendments previously in Arkansas. OSP has also advocated for election changes in Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa, and Kansas.

The Kansas City Star reported in a profile of OSP, “In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen, the organization has become a leading advocate for state bills to place restrictions on election administration.”

The Opportunity Solutions Project’s CEO, Tarren Bragdon, is also the CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Founded by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, ALEC crafts model policy bills for legislators to use around the country.

Ohio state Rep. Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, who sits on the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee, also sits on ALEC’s Board of Directors. Seitz currently has a separate bill moving to install photo voter ID in Ohio, as well as legislation to overhaul the Ohio Elections Commission.

In line with the ALEC priorities listed on the FGA website regarding welfare program reform, the OSP also has a track record of lobbying around the country for new restrictions on public benefit programs. In Kentucky it advocated for work requirements for food assistance, and in Wisconsin it backed similar requirements for Medicaid recipients. In Kansas, OSP lobbied for both.

As a 501(c)(4)organization, OSP doesn’t need to list its donors. In its native Florida, OSP has backed and even helped draft legislation that would further shield the identity of entities that contribute to organizations like itself.

The argument

Taylor argued the changes proposed for Ohio’s Constitution are a “simple reform with strong roots in American constitutionalism.” Demanding broad consensus for passage, he argued, insulates the constitution from frivolous changes.

“Out of state interests,” Taylor argued, “have made it their mission in recent years to drop into states, skirt the people’s representatives — you all — produce slick and at times misleading advertising campaigns, and pass their preferred policies by a slim margin of the vote.”

He insisted that approach undermines the integrity of the process. A higher threshold for passage, he argued, “would give Ohioans an important layer of trust in the initiative process.”

“Constitutions are fundamental law,” he said, “and changing that fundamental law should be more difficult than simply enacting a statute.”

Taylor went on to note excepting the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution has been amended just 17 times in 231 years. He argued the proposed changes won’t foreclose access to the ballot.

The questions

Taylor spent the better part of the next hour fielding questions from Democratic committee members. The irony of Taylor warning of out of state interests while speaking on behalf of a Florida-based dark money group wasn’t lost on Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Cleveland.

“Isn’t that an out of state based organization?” Sweeney asked about Opportunity Solutions Project.

“I know you’re an Ohioan yourself,” she went on, “but you’re here representing an organization that, your work is to go into states — which I’m not saying that’s wrong or bad — but your organization comes in to share your perspective, your agenda in multiple different states on ballot issues like this.”

Reps. Bishara Addison, D-Cleveland Heights, and Elgin Rogers, D-Toledo, both pressed Taylor on dark money. If Taylor’s complaint is with well-funded out of state interests, they asked, why aren’t you advocating for financial transparency legislation?

“It sounds like philosophically, you have an issue with out of state interests or out of state money coming into Ohio’s electoral process,” Addison said, “So do you have a position on the kinds of money that come into our campaigns?”

Chair Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, batted those questions down, however, arguing they strayed too far from the content of the resolution.

Rep. Richard Brown, D-Canal Winchester, grilled Taylor on the proposal’s timing. If greater consensus will better protect the constitution, Brown asked, why would the amendment go to voters during a low-turnout, odd-year primary election? Taylor didn’t offer much in response.

“I can’t speak to the intent of the sponsors, or to the wisdom of which ballot this should go on should it pass the House,” he said. “This is about restoring trust in democracy, and I believe that this resolution would accomplish that.”

The road ahead

The committee schedule for the coming week isn’t set. Before gaveling out, though, Chair Wilkin noted they may meet again Monday. That likely gives the committee time to vote on the resolution, and get it to the House floor next week.

Speaking after the hearing, Wilkin explained they held back a planned vote on the resolution because a few members weren’t able to attend. As for next week’s hearing, Wilkin said he expects the resolution will get a vote.

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

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MARCH, TWO former Ohio Republican Party leaders were convicted on racketeering and bribery charges in a scheme that federal prosecutors described as the state’s largest-ever corruption case. In total, five Republican operatives were indicted in the plot, which involved a power company bankrolling efforts to elect industry-friendly lawmakers and a new state House speaker who would support a $1.1 billion bailout of a failed nuclear power plant.

Now, despite the departure of the convicted Ohio Republican state House speaker and state party chair, the vestiges of Ohio’s GOP are still trying to undermine democracy in the state — and getting help from powerful outside groups.

In November, Ohio voters could decide on ballot measures covering abortion, cannabis legalization, and qualified immunity, the legal principle that protects government officials, including police, from many civil suits. Before those proposals are voted on, however, a separate measure put forward for an August special election could determine their fate. The measure would amend the state constitution to require more votes to approve the November ballot measures.

The constitutional amendment is deeply unpopular — it was first introduced in January and faced bipartisan opposition — but the proposal counts a major national political force among its supporters: Chicago-area billionaire Richard Uihlein, a GOP megadonor who supported groups involved in the January 6 attack in Washington and subsequent efforts to overturn elections.

The amendment is one of a raft of efforts in states across the country where extremist Republicans are taking drastic measures to circumvent the will of the public on issues like abortion, criminal justice, and education.

“It’s a broader project of enforcing political power for the hard-right-end of the Republican party.”

“It’s hard to come up with a better example of one individual — who, by the way, is of course not from Ohio and has no connection whatsoever to Ohio — using nothing but raw financial power to interrupt democracy,” Eli Szenes-Strauss — political director at Public Wise,a watchdog organization that has tracked Uihlein’s spending on election denial efforts — said of Uihlein. “It’s a broader project of enforcing political power for the hard-right-end of the Republican party.”

Uihlein’s support for the amendment to preempt the ballot measures is being funneled through a new political action committee formed in March called Save Our Constitution PAC, which is running ads in support of the change. Uihlein, founder of the shipping company Uline, gave the PAC $1.1 million last month. The contribution has not yet appeared in public financial disclosures and was first reported by the Columbus Dispatch. Uihlein has also funded smaller independent expenditures backing the measure, according to Public Wise, which also operates a PAC. (Neither Save Our Constitution PAC nor representatives for Uihlein responded to requests for comment.)

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One of the country’s biggest conservative political donors, Uihlein was the primary funder of the group that organized the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol.In the days after the attack, he and his wife gave more than $5 million to groups seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last month in Wisconsin, the Uihleins poured money into a competitive state Supreme Court race and backed a conservative candidate who lost.

CRITICS OF THE constitutional amendment have pointed out that voting on the proposal in August, instead of November, could mean that Republicans pushing the measure are violating a recently passed election law — that was advanced by Republicans. The August vote, however, will go ahead as planned unless the state Supreme Court decides otherwise in response to a pending lawsuit.

An advocacy group called One Person One Vote filed the suit against the Ohio Ballot Board earlier this month, arguing that putting the measure on the August ballot would violate the GOP’s new voting law that went into effect this year. The law prohibits elections with statewide ramifications from occurring outside of the regular primary or general election, partially because of the low attention voters pay to elections held in off-months.

One Person One Vote filed a second suit on Tuesday against the ballot board, claiming that it adopted a “misleading, prejudicial ballot title and inaccurate, incomplete ballot language that improperly favor[s] the Amendment in flagrant violation [of] Ohio’s Constitution and laws and this Court’s jurisprudence.”

The irony of Republicans trying to break their own law by holding an election in a summer month when voters won’t be paying attention was not lost on political observers: Republicans could use low turnout to advance a measure that would allow a minority to stop constitutional changes with support from the majority of Ohio voters.

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The proposed constitutional amendment asks voters to relinquish “the power of our majority vote and elevate minority rule in Ohio,” Ohio Capital Journal columnist Marilou Johanek wrote last week. Giving a minority of voters the power to block the majority could have an affect on hot-button issues, as in the case of abortion in Ohio, where a majority of voters — nearly 60 percent — support abortion rights.

Should it win in August, the constitutional change could make it harder to pass two other proposed November ballot initiatives that would legalize recreational cannabis and make it easier to hold police accountable for violating people’s civil rights. The second proposed change would prohibit the use of qualified immunity as a legal defense to civil actions brought under the amendment.

“Call it the tyranny of the minority over the will of most Ohio voters on abortion rights, on fair legislative districts, on commonsense gun safety, on minimum-wage increases,” Johanek wrote. The measure’s GOP sponsor and his colleagues “openly admit their plan is to thwart a likely pro-choice amendment on the November ballot with a preemptive legislative amendment to obliterate majority rule.”

Republicans claim the measure is an effort to fight outside special interests pushing a pro-abortion agenda. Those claims are belied by the fact that a billionaire from Illinois is funding the Republicans’ own anti-abortion effort.

“I’ll give them this, they’re very good at what they do,” said Szenes-Strauss, of Public Wise. “If I worked for them, I’d be pleased with their progress. It’s just a rolling effort to find a place where your money can make sure that people don’t do with democracy things that you’d rather they not do.”

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...The constitutional amendment is deeply unpopular — it was first introduced in January and faced bipartisan opposition — but the proposal counts a major national political force among its supporters: Chicago-area billionaire Richard Uihlein, a GOP megadonor who supported groups involved in the January 6 attack in Washington and subsequent efforts to overturn elections.....

one of the country’s biggest conservative political donors, Uihlein was the primary funder of the group that organized the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In the days after the attack, he and his wife gave more than $5 million to groups seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last month in Wisconsin, the Uihleins poured money into a competitive state

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https://www.propublica.org/article/voter-ref-foundation

Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump-Supporting Citizens to Hunt for Voter Fraud Using Discredited Techniques

database

At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.

“Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.

Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 18 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. Most recently, it added Texas. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 106 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.

[People line up at a polling place in Franklin, Wisconsin, on Nov. 3, 2020. VoteRef has posted that state's voter rolls. Credit:Chang W. Lee/The New York Times via Redux

VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.

And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

“The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.

“This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.

VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations:$800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriotspolitical action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

Doug Truax during his unsuccessful 2014 campaign in Illinois for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. VoteRef is an initiative of Truax’s nonprofit group Restoration Action and its political action committee. Credit:Joe Lewnard/Daily Herald via AP Photo

Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

“VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,”Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.”

Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.

Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)

She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.

“In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”

Flawed Methodology

As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.

To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.

For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.

“Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.

But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match.

Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”

In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.

But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.

“The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”

In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it's updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.

In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.

“It's up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”

Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.

Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.

Scrutinizing Voter Rolls and Neighbors

In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”

“Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.

The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.

“With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December.

Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.

Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

[A woman votes in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 3, 2020. The Voter Reference Foundation has posted that state’s voter roll. Credit:Maddie McGarvey/The New York Times via Redux

Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group —saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.

The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”

Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.

“As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”

While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible.

In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.

Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.

In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.

“Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.

Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.

"You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’

Support in GOP Circles

Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.

Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”

Gina Swoboda, left, who leads VoteRef, appears with Truax on his video podcast. Credit:Screenshot via RestorationPAC, YouTube

Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.

Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.

The network, which includesPipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timponeis listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.

In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.

Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.

Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.

Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.

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Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process.

Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas.

“We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.

Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.

He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”

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Inside the Peter Thiel-backed 'opaque media organization' that’s funding conservative propaganda: report

Alex Henderson October 11, 2022

In the past, billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was described by many pundits as a libertarian. But in the 2022 midterms, the far-right U.S. Senate candidates he has been promoting — from “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio to Blake Masters in Arizona — are decidedly MAGA, pushing a severe social conservatism that is far removed from libertarianism.

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Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast and former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration, has praised the 54-year-old Thiel for trying to make Congress as MAGA as possible.

One of the tricks that Thiel and his Republican allies are using in the midterms, according to Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill, is sending out “newspapers” that are meant to look like regular publications but are pushing MAGA candidates. In Arizona, Weill reports in an article published on October 11, such a publication is the Grand Canyon Times — which is promoting Masters, the MAGA Republican trying to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.

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“It was as if the Grand Canyon Times’ sports section had put a list of local football stars in a blender and printed the results,” Weill explains. “A brief profile on star running back Bijan Robinson was topped with a picture of tight end Aaron Greene, whose own biography showed a professional headshot of long snapper Ethan Nguyen. Other athletes’ profile pictures and biographical details also appeared randomized in the full-page spread on ‘former area high school football players.’ The rest of the paper—which was shared online by bemused Arizona sports fans — was chock-full of conservative political content, particularly articles championing Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters.”

READ MORE: Peter Thiel invested $1.5m in right-wing dating app 'The Right Stuff']

The Grand Canyon Times, Weill emphasizes, “isn’t a traditional newspaper,” but rather, is “part of an opaque media organization that recycles right-wing news articles across a network of hyperlocal-sounding news websites, which are padded out with press releases.”

“As the 2022 midterm elections approach, conservative campaigns have tapped the network to send realistic-looking, and unsolicited, newspapers to voters in critical districts,” Weill reports. “In publications like the Grand Canyon Times, the line between newspaper and political advertisement can be porous. At least two print editions of the paper, reviewed by The Daily Beast, contained disclaimers that described thecontents as ‘paid for by the Saving Arizona PAC.’ The PAC, which supports Masters’ Senate campaign, has received more than $13 million from conservative billionaire Peter Thiel.”

The Grand Canyon Times, according to Weill, is “an affiliate of Metric Media, a network of conservative websites tailored to look like local news outlets.” Metric, Weill reports, is “run by Brian Timpone, a former news anchor turned political spokesman.”

evil feck usaid benz

By Host

Apr 18, 2023

Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, is a former State Department diplomat who specialized in international communications and information technology matters.

Federal Newswire:

What is the Foundation for Freedom Online?

Mike Benz:

Our mission is to restore the golden age of the internet. The free and open internet that existed from the time it was privatized in 1991, up until the geopolitical earthquakes of 2016.

There was a sort of whole-society effort to implement domestic censorship. What my foundation does is attempt to educate policymakers and members of the public about how the censorship industry dynamics work, and what sorts of things can be done in the interest of freedom.

Federal Newswire:

In terms of that golden age, are you referring to when online debates were left unmoderated and uncensored?

Mike Benz:

That's exactly right. We're living in the revenge of the gatekeepers. There was discourse without bumper cars that existed on the internet pre-social media at the time of blogs and forums. [We were] able to talk to each other because [we] all shared the same platforms.

You had this growing maturity of an independent media news and influencer ecosystem that came, by 2016, to be able to approximate the reach of the New York Times or CNN. What you saw was pushback to try to stop independent media or independent voices from being able to impact our political and social ecosystems.

Federal Newswire:

How should we view the fall of traditional newspapers and the rise of independent journalism?

Mike Benz:

What you had after the events of Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 is a dual threat that traditional legacy news media faced. On the one hand, they were losing impact and the ability to be agenda setters at the political level. But then they were also losing on the revenue side because of free content, and the proliferation of alternative sources of news that didn't require you to [pay].

Often the New York Times and CNN were not the first broadcasters of news. Citizen journalists were there at the scene or had some insider scoop.

[There were] a number of changes to turn the knobs of volume down on news media competition, and to force a captured market to redirect eyeballs back to traditional media. So there were actually partnerships that were set up in early 2017.

One of them was called the Trust Project. Another was Google's OWL project for so-called authoritative news. It would escalate up the search recommendation algorithms.

So if you look, for example, at YouTube from pre-2017, you're going to see search recommendations that have a wide range of sourcing for them.

Starting in late 2017, almost all search results were going to have pinned to the top of it a source from CNN or MSNBC or the Washington Post… a so-called authoritative source. It's basically the news cartel that existed during the gatekeeper era getting favors from the big tech companies to outperform artificially alternative sources of news.

Federal Newswire:

If the consumer doesn't know that their news is being curated how can they really know that there's competition?

Mike Benz:

Not only are you right, but there are levels of scandal to this that I find to be fairly shocking, and that need a higher level of publicity.

For example, Andy O'Connell was a former senior executive at Facebook who rotated in after the 2016 election as a former Obama State Department and White House guy. He was part of a panel discussion at Stanford in 2019. It was a multi-stakeholder panel about what to do about content moderation.

There was this sort of heavy-handed early censorship work from 2017 to 2019, but a lot of it was getting pushback. They were concerned about something they called the martyr effect, which is what happens when you censor or you curate somebody out of existence, essentially out of search.

Federal Newswire:

You mean de-platforming?

Mike Benz:

Right. There was a time where there was a wide range of political viewpoints represented by the top 10 search results on Google,YouTube, or Facebook feeds. They were concerned about the martyr effect, which is when someone perceives they're being censored and then develop a greater affinity. The censorship sort of backfires.

What Andy O'Connell's said in that Stanford meeting was they needed to pursue more "nuanced and covert methods" for being able to do content moderation to avoid the martyr effect. You also started to see DARPA grant money flowing to this exact avenue.

In fact, there's an academic, I believe he's at George Washington University, Neil Johnson, who's published a number of DARPA funded studies on different kinds of censorship techniques to avoid the martyr effect.

For example, the traditional type of censorship in the early iteration in 2017 was sort of top down. If there's an influencer or news institution who you want to ban from Facebook or to get de-platformed from ads via NewsGuard or another entity, they would… just nuke that account, and they found there's a tremendous amount of blowback.

So they proposed bottom-up methods where rather than burying the individual, you bury a proportion of their followers or their top amplifiers.

They also had a technique called random partial, where it would be random.

You'd basically draw a topographical map of an online narrative or of an influencer's reach. Rather than capping the accounts of the three or four top lieutenants or of the bottom class, you would have a random partial 35% from a smattering of this and that in order to prevent the perception and the knowledge by the actual users of the platforms that this was being done.

So there's a science of censorship behind this, which really started out of work that was done by the foreign policy establishment for counterinsurgency purposes abroad.

Federal Newswire:

Are you saying we are applying a tool that we use to hunt and stop terrorists?

Mike Benz:

That's exactly right. What you see is almost a one to one transfer from foreign policy establishment domains who were the originators of the technology for foreign policy purposes, then transferring it to the civilian or the domestic facing arms.

In this case, you had these DARPA grants back in 2014-2015 to map the language of ISIS. What kind of things were they saying to recruit people on Facebook and Twitter?

They used an AI technique called natural language processing, which just looks at the language that people use; prefixes, suffixes, hashtags, and image databases. Then you’re basically able to affix a score to any social media post. This is 85% likely to be a pro-ISIS recruiting statement. This is 25%. You can fine-tune those algorithms over time.

You can really fine-tune these things to be weapons grade. What DARPA was doing for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in 2014-2015 is what the National Science Foundation is doing for conservative sentiment or COVID skepticism now.

There was a department of dirty tricks, and it was never supposed to come home. That social contract is now broken in the current age of mass censorship and there needs to be strong protections.

Federal Newswire:

Should there be a duty on the part of these platforms to tell their users they promote some content while moderating others?

Mike Benz:

Well, it's a fascinating question because there's sort of the normative answer and the legal answer. The two watch-words from 2017 to 2020 were transparency and accountability.

This is the idea that we need platform transparency about how populist political messaging is spreading on the platform, then we need accountability to punish them for allowing it. [Think of] pro-Trump and even some left-wing populist political issues. Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in his earlier iterations were also targets of some of this.

So transparency is… purely a consumer protection issue. We live in an era where you can't have a career in sales and marketing unless you have a Facebook, Google account, or YouTube account.

You are cut out of the information age and kicked back to the industrial age if you do not have access to these platforms. This is not really something you can opt in and opt out of if you want to be a part of the modern era.

Right now there are thorny issues around hate speech, but it's way past that. Now they're down to simple mis-, dis-, and mal-information. Malinformation, by definition of the Department of Homeland Security, is true information that if taken on the whole, could mislead people.

Federal Newswire:

Did you see Congressman Massie point out Arizona Senator Mark Kelly’s comments about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse where he said something to the effect of, "how do we censor correct information about the financial services industry to prevent a panic?" Is this malinformation?

Mike Benz:

I actually replied to Thomas Massie's post with citations to CISA. CISA is the cybersecurity subagency within the Department of Homeland Security that transitioned to cyber censorship by declaring misinformation to be a cyber attack on democratic institutions.

So that's how they gained long-arm jurisdiction over election discourse, COVID discourse, and immigration.

Even according to their own June 2022 mis- and disinformation subcommittee minutes, they proposed adding a new category for financial misinformation. What Thomas Massie was referring to from that Mark Kelly comment is actually an initiative already underway at the Department of Homeland Security, simply by declaring the financial sector critical infrastructure.

Misinformation about critical infrastructure is now a cyber attack on the critical infrastructure. The cybersecurity agency can work with its deputized disinformation flaggers to get your opinion taken off the internet.

Federal Newswire:

Is this to stop us from pulling our money out of the market?

Mike Benz:

Right. Well, they talk about this in the national security context. They say it's pro-democracy but… they're defending their own policy and pecuniary interests from democracy.

But you see for example this in the COVID origins debate. The plain factor of the matter is you had a huge amount of government funded censorship of online discourse about COVID origins.

You had Graphica, Pentagon funded, State Department funded, NSF funded. There were tens of millions of dollars poured into stopping the viral spread of your opinions about COVID on a lab leak theory.

Two weeks ago, Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, suggested that's the dominant theory endorsed by the FBI. So this is essentially the protection of noble lies.

Maybe you're right about something causing a bank run, but [this leads to] if you believe something, you need to wait until the government authorizes you to believe that.

Federal Newswire:

If they're trying to silence debate is that anti-science?

Mike Benz:

In fact, the only way to actually trust the science is that the process has been respected. This is one of the points that I keep hammering home about what's going on right now with government funding for the purpose of preserving trust and government.

I'll give you a great example. The National Science Foundation took this program from the Trump era called the Convergence Accelerator Program.

Trump in February 2019 set up this program to solve quantum technology. These are grand science home run challenges that require multi-disciplines; the chemists have to talk to the physicists, who have to talk to the rocket engineers. So it’s funding this convergence of scientists from different domains to accelerate one particular field of science.

So Track A was quantum technology. The Biden administration gets into office, they inherit this giant science accelerator program, and they create a new track called Track F. It's called trust and authenticity. But the entire thing is for science censorship.

Now they declare in the founding program documents that the purpose of this is that mis- and disinformation on the internet is causing a crisis in democracy. It's undermining trust in government and trust in democratic institutions such as mainstream media.

To restore that trust, they're developing AI censorship techniques to tune down people who sow distrust or cast doubt on scientific consensus. Now, you've got a situation where they're essentially saying, "If trust cannot be earned, it must be installed."

Federal Newswire:

Have you heard of any people who have paid Facebook for promotion services and received no change in their outreach or sales?

Mike Benz:

One of the fascinating contributions of the Twitter files has been hard, unimpeachable evidence and screenshots of the Twitter accounts of high-profile accounts with various classifier labels given to them in the backend. They showed accounts like James O'Keefe and Charlie Kirk, and the screenshots from the Twitter file show they do not amplify.

Basically, all sorts of what they call friction. Every social media company uses this sort of tripartite tier system for how to censor the information. They call it remove, reduce, inform. Remove is a ban. Inform is a fact-check label. Reduce is where a lot of the magic is.

Friction is a word for slowing down the virality. That's everything from search bans, recommendation bans, shadow bans, interstitials, click-throughs, and sort of viral circuit breakers.

Federal Newswire:

Is the intent to slow the gain of followers?

Mike Benz:

Right. What we do know is that there has been a hugely robust ecosystem of political narratives that are tagged on the basis of this.

One of the things that my foundation has covered is [how this was applied] both on COVID and on election discourse for the 2020 election and 2022 midterms. Hashtags, branding terms, specific events at both at the state level and the national level were programmed into the AI to be able to detect the associated keywords and then automatically tune down the pro side of that equation; to turn down the knobs so that they couldn't make political impact.

Federal Newswire:

So when I would tag something like that I'm doing my tweets a disservice?

Mike Benz:

You are. Yes. You're making it easy for that to be detected.

Federal Newswire:

Can competition solve these problems?

Mike Benz:

Sure. [But consider] the famous example of Parler. After the 2020 election you had an alternative social media platform that was banned from competition because of gatekeepers up the stack.

You had their payment processors cut off, you had Amazon Web Services cut off their ability to use the cloud. But there's another aspect of this.

Every single one of the major tech platforms that exist today are government contractors. They are all subs. Google's got CIA contracts, DOD contracts. You've got this huge interrelationship with Facebook and the U.S. State Department for our foreign policy operations abroad. You had the same thing with Twitter all the way back 2007 to 2009.

They were part of the Office of Policy Coordinations operations in dozens of countries. Same thing with YouTube. Then even at the infrastructure level, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Amazon has a $10 billion cloud contract with the CIA.

There is a leg up that the entrenched big tech companies have that you cannot compete with in a fair market, free market way because these are federal government-subsidized big businesses.

Federal Newswire:

What did you do for the State Department?

Mike Benz:

I was the deputy assistant secretary for International Communications and Information Technology, which is a long way of saying I ran the big tech portfolio for the State Department in the Economic Bureau.

I had three divisions under me. One was on security defending IT as it relates to low earth satellites and SpaceX and subsea cables and fiber optics. Another was our U.S. tech policy vis-a-vis countries on a one-off basis. The third division was multilateral affairs, which is basically the private sector.

This is where I ran into the Google lobbyists and the Facebook and the big tech consortium, and the nexus between big government and big tech.

I was there basically towards the end of 2020, principally where it was this period of intense consolidation between big government and big tech and a moment when big tech had basically severed the final vestiges of the social contract that had existed since the early '90s.

Federal Newswire:

Is that the danger?

Mike Benz:

Right. I'm a foreign policy realist on these things. It's a big bad world out there. I don't weigh into the substantive foreign policy thing on the grounds of saying we shouldn't have a full-throated, aggressive Maximalist foreign policy on these things.

But when big-government did favors for big-oil, when we treat ExxonMobil and Chevron as U.S. national champions in the oil space, at least in that case, you don't get cut off at the pump.

Federal Newswire:

Are we moving towards the beginning of a Chinese-style social crediting system?

Mike Benz:

We're no longer even in the infancy stages of that. We are in the adolescent stages. In fact, much of it is government funded. One classic example right off the bat that's been in the news a lot lately is a company called NewsGuard.

It was basically created in November, 2017 as an attempt to try to bankrupt the industry of so-called fake news. You had the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, MSNBC, BBC, Reuters, AP–sort of a news phalanx–that came up with a plan in tandem with allies in the national security state.

On their board, by the way, is Rick Stengel, who ran the global engagement side of the State Department, General Michael D. Hayden, former CIA, NSA head and four-star General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO, Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. It's a who's who of media institutions and top brass of national security.

What they created and what they've successfully implemented is a news ranking system for news credibility that they run through advertiser networks. [They] get the social media companies to de-platform news institutions so that there's no click-through traffic to their sites and then to get them banned from Google Ads and all of the major ad distribution platforms.

This is how they contained the independent news revolution that was budding up until 2017. NewsGuard, the Trust Project, there's a dozen of these companies. By the way, three quarters of them have government funding.

Federal Newswire:

Has there been a concerted effort on the part of the journalism field to move away from objective journalism to advocacy journalism?

Mike Benz:

Exactly. It's both-side-ism is what they call it. They need to abandon the objectivity principle because both sides lead to demagogues being able to come up.

But at the end of the day, it's the creation of a protected news cartel; because just like in the example of a big tech company, it's not like you can just create a lemonade stand and out-compete on the basis of better lemonade.

They're getting their sales not from the people on your street corner. They're getting their sales from the Department of Defense, Department of State, the USA.

You have a similar thing now happening in the news industry where if you want to create a competing news institution to CNN, well, guess what? CNN's got NewsGuard on their back. They're going to have you de-banked, de-platformed.

You're not going to be able to have a YouTube account, a Facebook account. Now you can finally potentially have a Twitter account but you're not going to be able to monetize through ads on your site. You're entering the coliseum of the free market with one hand tied behind your back and both of your legs cut off.

Federal Newswire:

Can you explain how you found out about early AI uses for the internet?

Mike Benz:

When I was practicing law and observing events in 2016, I came across research and news documents around the use of AI for content moderation on the internet. I saw the parallels between that and what I felt like I'd lived through as a kid in chess.

I tried to tell everybody I could, freedom on the internet has this existential threat to it right now because they're going to do for chess analysis what Deep Blue and Fritz and Hydra did to completely change the game of chess–they're going to do that but with the stakes of Western civilization.

They're going to be able to look at any political narrative, any social belief. They're going to be able to draw a topographical map of it. They're going to be able to say what your score is for any particular social media post. They're going to be able to transcribe your voice with speech to text.

The whole thing is going to be almost like a nuclear weapon. You don't need a standing army of a hundred thousand censors. You can have one disinfo-lab in Stanford that is going to be able to provide input to computer scientists.

So lo and behold, that's exactly what happened after the 2016 election.

You had institutions like Google Jigsaw who took this DARPA-funded AI. They started applying it domestically.

Federal Newswire:

What’s your take on AI?

Mike Benz:

In the chess world you had these AI chess engines that changed how people interacted with the game. In fact, there came to be this phenomenon called chess DJ'ing which is where a human would basically DJ four or five different chess engines in the process of creating a new chess line.

We're actually seeing that right now with ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Bard and all these different generative AI things.

I didn't see what happened in the chess world as being an attack on humans. It was opening up new lines of possibility and beauty that the human eye couldn't see until it could DJ different engines to see it.

We're now at the early stage of that revolution happening in the online content generation space. What ChatGPT-4 just opened up two days ago is the ability to draw something on a napkin and it auto generates a website, a music video, all this stuff.

It's incredible. All of it is now coming to the fingertips of 300 million Americans the moment they get versed in it. This is going to open up new lines of beauty. It's going to change news because it's going to change multimedia.

Federal Newswire:

How do folks find out more about the work that you do at the foundation for Freedom Online?

Mike Benz:

We're at foundationforfreedomonline.com. You can follow my updates online on Twitter at @Mikebenzcyber.

ORGANIZATIONS IN THIS STORY

U.S. Department of State|U.S. Department of Commerce