If money talks, then it’s telling an interesting story about the 2020 election. Most conservatives already knew — or maybe even experienced — Big Tech’s censorship. It’s the world’s worst kept secret that the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon are hard-core liberal activists. But what about their employees? Is there more political diversity in the rank and file who fulfill your Prime orders and help spit out search results? According to the latest campaign spending reports, the answer is a resounding no.

Big Tech isn’t just beholden to the Democratic Party, they are the Democratic Party. In an eye-opening new piece by Bloomberg, American workers are painting an interesting picture on politics. In the biggest bubbles of Biden support, there are some familiar names: Disney, Target, Wells Fargo, Starbucks, Nike. None of those comes as much of a surprise — but what will surprise people is just how deeply entrenched these views are. Of Google’s 6,900 employees who donated to political campaigns, a whopping 97 percent gave to Joe Biden. At Facebook, the numbers are identical: 3,300 employees donated — and only three percent of them gave to Trump.

At Amazon, a mammoth company with — one would assume — a more varied workforce, the results were stunningly lopsided. Of the 10,000 employees who gave, 80 percent sent their dollars to Biden. Only teachers, professors, and university staffs came close. Of the 51,000 professors who donated, 94 percent gave to Biden. People who listed “teacher” as their profession were only slightly less overt. Eighty-four percent of the 187,000 educators who donated were Biden supporters. Even U.S. government workers funneled their money almost exclusively to the Democratic candidate, at a rate of 84 percent Biden-16 percent Trump.

If you’re wondering where the president’s contributions came from, try homemakers, construction workers, truckers, farmers, and police officers. “Employees tilted the most to Trump were the New York Police Department and the U.S. Marines, with almost 70 percent of employees who made contributions to one of the two presidential campaigns favoring the incumbent.” In the corporate world, only one stood out: Walmart, who gave to Trump by the narrowest of margins, 52-48 percent. Even of the 9,000 professed pastors, Biden was financially competitive: 44 percent to Trump’s 56 percent.

Of course, as everyone knows from this year’s razor-thin results, money can’t buy everything. In the House and Senate, where Democrats dumped hundreds of millions of dollars, the efforts have proven to be a big fat waste. With Republicans about to come within five seats of House control, and the Senate poised to defend its majority, the Left hasn’t gotten a whole lot of return on its investment. By Election Day, liberal donors had forked over more than seven billion dollars, “doubling the spending by Republican candidates up and down the ballot.” In the end, however, no amount of money could make up for the Democrats’ real problem: their wildly unpopular socialistic agenda.

As for Big Tech, it was just a couple of weeks ago that senators pressed these CEOs about the political make-up of their companies. Could it be impacting how they “monitor” speech, they wondered? “I don’t expect you to have taken a poll of your employees, but I just want to get kind of a sense — because I think it’s pretty obvious — would you say that the political ideology of the employees at your company is, let’s say 50/50? Conservative vs. liberal/progressive? Or do you think it’s closer to 90 percent liberal, 10 percent conservative?” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) asked.

To a man, they downplayed their leftist leanings. Only Zuckerberg admitted what most of us knew: “I don’t know the exact number, but I would guess that our employee base skews Left-leaning,” said the Facebook chief. Google’s Sundar Pichai feigned ignorance. “Republicans, liberals, conservatives, and so on, and we have definitely made an effort to make sure people of all viewpoints are welcome.” Twitter’s Jack Dorsey also played dumb. “I don’t know the makeup of our employees, because it’s not something we ask or focus on.” Well, now we know. Conservative beliefs aren’t just unwelcomed on their platforms, but it appears to be the same in their offices too.

Originally published here.

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Trump Team Looks at Cause and Elect

They flooded downtown D.C. holding patriotic flags and signs, a mass of Americans filling the streets to show their support for the president. The media would ignore them, of course — but the sea of Million MAGA marchers, like the dozens of campaign rallies leading up to the election, would be hard to overlook. Chants of “Count every vote!” rang out — a cry echoed in courtrooms across the states, where the Trump campaign fights on. Whether his efforts will be enough to save his presidency, no one knows. But could they save an election system bogged down by doubts and questions? That, in the long run, may be just as important.

“It’s going to be that I got 74 million votes, and I lost?” an incredulous President Trump told columnist Michael Goodwin. “It’s not possible.” Not since Grover Cleveland’s reelection campaign in 1888, the Federalist confirms, “has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost five million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election.”

At the end of the day, President Trump shrugged, “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.” But, he said, “it’s hard to come to terms [with the results] when they won’t let your poll watchers in to observe [the counting].” And that counting is especially important now, with less than 70,000 votes separating the candidates across the handful of deciding states. With concerns about the voting systems and ballot dumps swirling, it’s no wonder 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results have been free and fair.

Late Friday, Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chair Trey Trainor confirmed those fears, telling Americans, “I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in these [contested areas]. Otherwise, they would allow observers to go in.” Our whole political system, he insisted, “is based upon transparency to avoid the appearance of corruption.” If the law isn’t followed, Trainor agreed, then the outcome is “illegitimate.” These allegations by the Trump campaign, Trainor said, are “very valid,” and they need to be “fully vetted” by the courts.

Meanwhile, concerns continue to swirl around Dominion Voting Systems — not just about the millions of votes the president argued had been deleted in a “glitch,” but also about the company’s ideological leanings. Reporters dug through the FEC’s financial reports and discovered 96 of the company’s staffers had donated to the Democrats’ 2020 political cause. Only four percent of Dominion employees gave to Republicans — raising plenty of eyebrows about the machines’ “malfunctions.” The storyline sounded even fishier when Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the head of the machines’ software company, Smartmatic — Peter Neffenger — is part of Biden’s transition team.

Twenty-eight states used those voting machines. “Beyond this election,” Giuliani argued, “this whole thing has to be examined as a national security matter. The governors who gave contracts to this company never bothered to do any due diligence.”

Other things, experts say, just plain don’t add up. Pollster Patrick Basham, who’s British, continues to maintain that the election was “stolen.” In a column for a U.K. newspaper, he points to Biden’s unusual numbers in certain cities. How curious, he writes, that “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.” In some cases, he said, citing analyst Robert Barnes, in these “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.”

For now, conservatives are taking consolation in the biggest upsets of the year: the GOP’s incredible gains in the House. When all is said and done, Republicans could be within five seats of the majority — a far cry from the shellacking the media predicted. Fourteen races are still being certified, but on Friday, Republican Young Kim ® managed to flip another Democratic seat in California. Judging by the GOP’s numbers in the districts that haven’t been called, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could be looking at the smallest House majority in 100 years.

Inside the party, angry finger-pointers are everywhere. “Progressives refuse to take any responsibility,” the editors of the Wall Street Journal explain — and yet, their radical policies are almost certainly to blame. “House Democrats turned sharply leftward in the last two years as they indulged progressive priorities across the policy spectrum.” The result? Republican candidates had a field day with political ads, blasting every bit of their extreme agenda: “socialism, defunding the police, raising taxes, and eliminating oil and gas drilling.” If they didn’t know it before, Democrats know it now: Americans don’t want what the far-Left is selling. And if Pelosi and company ignore that fact, 2022 is another wake-up call in the making.

Originally published here.

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Target’s Censorship Shelf Destructs

It’s no wonder our children are confused about their gender, since even the dictionary can’t define it! In an announcement that will make people’s heads swim, Oxford University Press agreed to change the meaning the word “woman” and “man” — because of an online petition! Incredibly, some of the most respected lexicographers in the world have thrown in the towel, caving to cries that certain words should be more “gender neutral.” And dictionaries, Apple TV makes clear, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Left’s high-speed gender train aren’t just coming for your bookshelf, but your sons and daughters too. This week, Amazon is debuting a new docuseries meant to persuade parents that all children are gender fluid. “Becoming You,” the show that LGBTQ activists are hailing as groundbreaking, follows 100 girls and boys around the world over their first five years, making the case that moms and dads shouldn’t hold hard and fast to biological realities.

“We hope the viewers take away an understanding that although young children talk about gender, their sense of it is much more fluid than ours,” executive producer Hamo Forsyth said. “So much so that kids of [three and four] can imagine they are genuinely going from one gender to the other as they change clothes during dressing-up games, for example. It isn’t really until they go to school at five that they start to think of gender as something more permanent.”

In a country where 12 percent of millennials now say they identify as transgender or “non-gender conforming” — more than one in every 10 — the last thing our children need is a generation of parents indulging these dangerous fantasies. And yet, that’s exactly the goal of Apple TV and their extremist cheerleaders. Of course, FRC’s Peter Sprigg points out, the irony here is that by trying to brainwash every family, these LGBTQ activists are actually contradicting their own argument.

“If ‘all kids are gender fluid,’” Peter explains, “that means that not every kid who engages in gender-non-conforming behavior is innately ‘transgender’ — and it certainly shouldn’t be a license to alter and mutilate their bodies.” In some cases, maybe forming a “gender identity” is a developmental process that takes a few years, he agrees. “The problem with the aggressive transgender movement is that it disrupts that normal process by telling kids that what they like to do is ‘who they are’ and their bodies are irrelevant.”

It’s bad enough that America has a presidential candidate encouraging transgender treatments for elementary school kids. But suggesting that every parent should embrace this radical rejection of their child’s biological reality is a pathway to self-destruction and misery. Just ask author Abigail Shrier. She’s talked to hundreds of families who are dealing with the fallout of this devastating ideology — many of them lifelong LGBT supporters who cannot understand why doctors, counselors, teachers, and activists are trying to lock their children into a future of gender confusion.

She was so compelled by the stories of heartbreak that she wrote a book warning parents, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Girls. In it, Shrier explains that this is an issue of consensus for most parents, regardless of where they fall politically. “Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and ‘gender-affirming’ educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls — including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.”

Not surprisingly, the fringe activists pushing this agenda have gone ballistic that someone like Shrier has the nerve to tell the truth about their agenda. They bullied Amazon into blocking ad buys for the book. Then, this past week, a single tweet was all it took to persuade Target to pull the title from their shelves. The move hardly came as a shock, since this is the same company that still allows men in their girls’ restrooms and changing rooms. Before long, the ACLU jumped into the fray, with one of its attorneys tweeting, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100 percent a hill I will die on.” So much for the ACLU defending free speech.

Conservatives fumed, circulating the story across social media. Ultimately, the attention was too much and Target, probably fearing another boycott, backtracked. Twenty-four hours later, the company released this statement: “Yesterday, we removed a book from Target.com based on feedback we received. We want to offer a broad assortment for our guests and are adding this book back to Target.com. We apologize for any confusion.” It was the right decision. If only, shoppers would agree, Target would show that same common sense in their bathroom policy.

To hear the truth about the transgender agenda that the Left would do anything to hide, check out this interview with Abigail Shrier.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.