by R. Cort Kirkwood, The New American:
Yet again, another leftist political outfit appears to be a scam.
Recall Black Lives Matter. Conceived in 2013 after the justified police shooting of Michael Brown in St. Louis, BLM’s Marxist principals purchased real estate with millions raised from the George Floyd Hoax.
Then there was the Lincoln Project, a hate-Trump outfit whose self-dealing principals — one of whom was a homosexual stalker — bilked the organization out of millions.
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Now, it’s Leaders We Deserve PAC, created by David Hogg, a professional anti-gun activist, and Kevin Lata, a Democratic campaign veteran.
Breitbart has reported that very little of the millions of dollars the PAC has raised has gone to help elect leftist gun grabbers, the group’s stated purpose. Instead, most of the money pays for “consultants” and travel and hotels for Hogg and Lata.
David Hogg got exposed https://t.co/wcExcv3eDQ
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 9, 2024
Where the Money Went
The outfit’s purpose is electing Generation Z Democrats, who know as little about life as Hogg, who at 24 years old is a full-time celebrity. Hogg’s notoriety arose from the mass shooting at Parkland, Florida’s, Marjory Stoneman High in 2018, where he was a student. Hogg, who’s been shooting his mouth off about guns ever since, landed at Harvard and graduated in 2023.
Apparently, Hogg is better at bellowing anti-gun nonsense than he is at handling the loot he collects for Leaders We Deserve.
“Hogg launched the group with great fanfare, telling National Public Radio (NPR) that during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, a ‘social movement’ was born on the left,” Breitbart observed:
“For every year of Trump’s presidency, I think there was a new chapter of a social movement that was born, whether it was the Women’s March, March for Our Lives, the environmental movement, or the movement for Black Lives,” Hogg said.
Hogg touted his group’s efforts to elect young Democrat candidates — promising that Leaders We Deserve PAC would provide them with the resources they needed to win races:
[We’re] trying to pick them and say, you know, we would like to help you run for office, we’ll supply you with all of the resources that you need and help basically coach you and hold your hand to get there, which is kind of the gap that’s in the space right now, for at least young people at the state legislative level.
Alas and alack, like BLM and the Lincoln Project, Hogg’s PAC has developed different priorities for the money it raises.
“Since Hogg’s group came into fruition, much of the few million dollars raised has gone not to electing candidates or executing its stated mission but to luxurious expenses, such as travel bills, as well as political consultants and legal fees,” Breitbard reported:
In fact, the group, in 2023, only spent on a handful of candidates — four to be exact—one of whom was already serving in the U.S. Congress, Frost, and another who lost a race in a special election in Alabama. The vast majority of the group’s money, the FEC filings from 2023 show, did not go to helping candidates at all — and much of it went to other political consultants at various firms, as well as to Hogg and Lata, with a lavish travel budget to boot.
Last year’s filing with the Federal Election Committee showed that the PAC raised $3,035,868.87.
The PAC has some “very high-profile” donors:
- Barbara Weitz — $100,000;
- Venture capitalist Ronald Conway — $100,000
- Judy Wise, senior gun control advisor to President Barack Obama — $25,000
- Filmmaker Alexander Adell — $10,000;
- Tusk Holdings CEO Bradley Tusk — $10,000.
Another Hogg-linked PAC, Ban Assault Weapons Now!, gave the group $41,000.
Still, despite the big donors, “most of the donors to Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve PAC were small-dollar donors giving less than $250 a pop,” Breitbart continued. The big donors accounted for less than $400,000 of the outfit’s big take.
But “that is where things get interesting,” the website continued:
So these guys — Hogg and his partner Lata — raised all this money, and then they turned around and spent it mostly not on candidates or the cause they were purporting to support. They spent a huge chunk of the money living large — and on political consultants.
Of the more than $3 million raised in its first year of operations, the Leaders We Deserve PAC spent only about $263,000 on its stated mission of electing candidates from Generation Z to office combined with donations to other Democrat Party committees and groups — and instead spent more than $1.4 million on disbursements to themselves for payroll and to political consulting firms and legal fees, in addition to travel and entertainment expenses like hotels, flights, and meals.
The FEC records show that Hogg’s group spent more than $51,000 across several payments to a group called Accelerate Political Advisors and another more than $25,000 across several payments to a firm called Bee Compliance, LLC. In addition, the group spent more than $83,000 on legal fees to Elias Law Group, the firm headed by Democrat lawyer Marc Elias. Leaders We Deserve spent another more than $28,000 over two payments, the records show, for “Communications Consulting” from a group called “Liftoff Campaigns” and yet another $60,000 for “Strategic Consulting” from a firm called “Lim Consulting Services.”
The group paid more than $1.1 million to two political consultants, Grassroots Analytics and Middle Seat, for such services as “digital consulting,” “list acquisition,” “digital ads,” and “SMS texting.”
Total on lawyers and consultants: More than $1.3 million. “That means Hogg and his crew spent nearly half the money he raised just on other political consultants and legal fees, not on candidates,” Breitbart observed.
A deep dive into the FEC figures also revealed these expenditures — again, not on candidates, but on travel, meals, and entertainment. Hogg and Lata reported almost $36,000 on Uber and Lyft rides, flights, hotels, restaurants, and more.
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