When Dark Money Funds A “Anti-Dark Money” Initiative You Should Smell A Rat

Please follow us on X and Telegram

Aren’t people clever?  Start by getting massive amounts of dark money from nonresident billionaires seeking to control Montana’s politics.  Then run a ballot initiative that claims to control dark money influence in Montana.  Bait and switch.  Brilliant!  Why, it’s enough to get you really cynical about politics…

The dark money-funded I-194 signs and advertising are everywhere.  It all sounds so doggone good.   Too much dark money in politics, you say to yourself.  Too much wealthy out-of-state influence.  We need to do something about it.  Maybe this will help.  You don’t have time to read and analyze 6 pages of legislative legalize, but you figure, what the heck. It’s worth a try. 

Congratulations.  You have just been hoodwinked.  By dark money.  For dark money.

As I read the thing, something immediately didn’t ring true.  Then it hit me.  I-194 is not a proposal to control dark money.  It is a proposal to empower dark money sources on the left (out-of-state billionaires), by controlling and banning the in-state money sources on the right.  From its very inception, I-194 wasn’t about fairness.  It was about unfairness — about unbalancing the scales and advantaging one end of the political spectrum by disadvantaging the other. 

In places like Montana, where far-left Democrats mostly can’t win at the polls, moderating their views to something approximating common sense is too much to ask.  The answer is to change the rules, and create a gratuitous power shift that voters won’t notice.  The deck suddenly has 54 cards, jokers are wild and they’re dealing from the bottom.  That’s I-194.

Here’s how they plan to do it.

The so-called Montana Plan starts by carving out as fully protected from the initiative itself, those very sources of secretive big bucks that most benefit the far-left Democrats:  non-resident billionaire elitists who send their checks to the 501(c)(4)s. These nonprofit corporations scoop up unlimited amounts with no donor transparency whatsoever. 

They didn’t tell you this, did they?  They also didn’t tell you that the initiative’s campaign organization  has been funneling its major donors through one of these dark money 501 c (4)s (Transparent Election Initiative, run by the same people,) thereby slurping up millions in legally shrouded secrecy.  The very thing they sanctimoniously condemn, they themselves do to perfection!  As a June Montana Free Press story put it, the group “obscures its own financial backers with a murky fundraising structure.”   Every day is Laundry Day at I-194 headquarters! This is more than irony.  It’s moral blindness.  Yet we are told to trust them anyway.

While the New York super-rich are anxious to flex their new-found muscles in Montana elections, the countervailing effect of I-194 on every Montanan who values his political liberties and freedom of speech will be devastating. Why?  Because, in effect, I-194 aims its sights only on Montana-based entities (ranches, small businesses, LLCs, nonprofits, tradesman groups, etc.) by threatening to revoke their very legal existence.  Entities outside of Montana are beyond its reach.  Open season on Montanans only. 

The Frontier Institute rightly calls this selective muzzling of undefined political speech “a dangerous expansion of government power… a dangerous claim that existence under the law is a privilege the government may condition on silence about elections.”

This shouldn’t surprise you, because the leftist political philosophy is all about control.  Not fairness.  Not open debate.  Not equal protection.  Just control.  No matter how immoral or coercive the means of getting there.  Fair warning, Montanans: if we let this happen, by carelessly passing I-194, there may be no going back. 

If you are still undecided, this final word of advice.  Take a hard look at the I-194 section of the SOS’s Voter Information Pamphlet, pages 18 through 28.  Better yet, just attempt to interpret the proposal’s language itself.  This is a statutory initiative, which means the voters are expected to pass a 6-page bill – all new additions to the Montana Code – that in the careful process of representative government, would be thoroughly vetted and passed by committees in both houses (to include robust citizen testimony,) then debated and passed by both the state House and Senate, and finally signed by the governor. 

You are asked to take the place of all of that.  Why did proponents choose to circumvent our elected representatives?  Because never in a hundred years would our legislators have ever approved this radical Trojan Horse.  Even some Democrats would reasonably vote against it.  Maybe – just maybe – legislators are in a better position to understand and judge this legalistic monstrosity than you and I.  The best rule to follow will always be, “When in doubt, vote no.”

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!