Opinion

Are We Funding The Resistance?

John Linder Former Congressman
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They call themselves the Resistance. They resist the results of a free and fair election and have resolved to delegitimize the winner. It is no longer racist to disagree with the president.

The catechism of their faith lays out the tactics to be taken for salvation. Chapter four of the Indivisible guide specifically prescribes how to disrupt Republican town hall meetings. It includes booing the Member of Congress and applauding each other as well as not giving up the microphone. Had they organized the presidential election as precisely as they are organizing the Resistance they might have elected a president. Oh, that’s right. Hillary.

This is not new for the Left. We’ve seen similar efforts to disrupt for 50 years. In 1966 Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote in The Nation, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.

The Cloward-Piven strategy is disruption. ACORN was a product of Cloward-Piven. ACORN demanded rights for welfare recipients and loans for low-income people. To get results they stormed into banks and threatened the families of bank officers at their homes.

All of this requires organization and staff, which requires money. ACORN had been funded for decades by grants from the federal government. HUD, for example, paid them to help low income Americans get housing. When Project Veritas exposed ACORN as a scam Congress removed all of their funding from the federal government. The discredited leadership now runs Mutual Housing Association of New York which was the recipient of new funding through a recent Bank of America settlement.

We’ve seen this strategy throughout the last eight years. Our southern border was invaded by tens of thousands of immigrant children in 2014. They came prepared with directions on what to tell the border guards and with the names and addresses of where they should be sent. Catholic Charities and other religious organizations, paid for by the taxpayer, settled thousands of them across our country. Syrian immigrants are similarly being settled today.

If the goal was to disrupt otherwise calm communities, it was successful.

George Soros funded riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte and Dallas. The Obama administration contributed to the societal disruption by meeting with the leaders of the riots in the White House.

Soros’ Open Society Foundations as well as other liberal foundations are funding riots on campuses to stop the appearance of conservative speakers.

What is yet unknown is whether President Obama arranged for permanent funding of a shadow government and whether he will openly lead it.

His former campaign organization is now Organizing for Action and is focused on the Resistance. In a conference call just after the election he encouraged them to organize a grass roots opposition.

Their funding may already be in place. In the first five years of the Obama administration the Justice Department raised $128 billion in bank fines. Where did it go?

Some went toward mortgage relief for low-income borrowers, but much went to private organizations pursuing left-wing causes.

Attorney General Lynch announced that the Department of Justice collected $23 billion in settlements in fiscal year 2015. More than $16.2 billion in payments were made directly to the Justice Department and more than $6.8 billion in indirect payments made to other federal agencies, states and other designated recipients. Who are the other designated recipients?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it has collected $11.8 billion from financial institutions. Where did that money go?

It has been reported that some settlements have allowed businesses to make contributions to approved charitable organizations rather than paying fines. Who are these approved organizations? How much did they receive?

Hillary Clinton has stepped up her critiques of President Trump through Twitter. Eric Holder has made it clear that we will soon be hearing more from President Obama and Valerie Jarrett has moved into the Obama home in Washington DC to, I expect, organize the opposition.

We need to know if the taxpayers are paying for it.

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