Even well-informed conservative groups who have studied the Center for Technology and Civic Life and its impact on the 2020 election tend to drastically understate the far-left partisan leanings of its founders and administrators. The nonprofit CTCL used approximately $350 million from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to manipulate the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden by funding local election offices, with most of the funding going to Democrat-run districts and functioning as a major get-out-the-vote effort.
The group’s key directors are not technology-focused individuals who incidentally pushed “left of center” voting policies. They are far-left radicals who have repeatedly expressed contempt for the rule of law in U.S. elections, and bitter contempt for conservative politicians and the tens of millions of Americans who vote for them.
Seeds of Radicalism
Our social media research shows that CTCL grew from the seeds planted in the fever swamp of leftist election activism known as “RootsCamp 2012.” Since then, CTCL leaders have universally allied themselves with far-left causes such as critical race theory, critical legal theory, and the “defund the police” movement, and have publicly and repeatedly slandered conservatives — and even middle-of-the-road liberals — as irredeemable, dyed-in-the-wool “fascists.”
RootsCamp was billed as “a progressive conference featuring field organizers, data wranglers, and digital strategists” from Obama for America, the AFL-CIO, Arizona’s Adios Arpaio campaign, Marylanders for Marriage Equality, and other progressive organizations, many of whom were apprenticed over the years by the host of RootsCamp, the infamous New Organizing Institute.”
On November 27, 2012, Jamie McGonnigal, the director of RootsCamp, described the event and its advocacy of perpetual political activism in an interview with Campaign Sick Blogspot:
At the New Organizing Institute, we are big fans of what we refer to as ‘Engagement Organizing.’ It’s taking organizing to a new level by encouraging people to stay involved and build movements even when there isn’t a vote to worry about.
The way it works is that when you come in, you’ll see a mostly blank agenda we call ‘The Wall.’ During the opening events, you fill out a card for a session you’d like to present, turn it in to our Wall creators and head to the first pre-seeded session.
In an article for Mother Jones, Tim Murphy writes: “The names of the sessions alone tell the story: “Unf-cking Elections with Data”; “Memeification of Rapid Response Social Media Fast & Furious”; “How to generate 1000 tweets using segmented email blasts.” The New Organizing Institute was conceived as “operat[ing] in perpetual election mode grooming Democratic field operatives across the country.”
These “field operatives” include the same people who founded CTCL and determined its supposedly “nonpartisan” agenda and grant policy during the 2020 election.
CTCL Founders’ Involvement
On December 2, 2012, Whitney May, Christina Sinclaire, and Tiana Epps-Johnson, who would later go on to found and manage CTCL, were excited to host their very own RootsCamp panel in Conference Room 144c.
They expressed their objectives in “colorful” coded language, such as “BDSM the Vote.” BDSM refers to the sexual fetish “Bondage, Discipline and Sado-Masochism.” It implies control, humiliation, and forced submission, although we hesitate to speculate about precisely what is involved in this particular fetishization of elections. It can’t be good for those who believe that elections should be conducted on the basis of mutual respect and the rule of law.
They used the hashtag #aggressiveprogressives, a pro-Bernie Sanders label that is most closely associated with the popular left-wing and rabidly anti-Trump media site “The Young Turks (TYT).” May, Sinclaire, and Epps-Johnson’s words suggest an overall disdain for election law, their political opponents, and the norms of election administration, along with their intent to disrupt the normal election process to promote “progressive” ideals.
Fast-Forward to November 2020
The goal of these three CTCL founders and directors — to disrupt the electoral system in favor of far-left candidates and progressive causes — eventually came to fruition as a result of CTCL’s $350 million investment in the 2020 election to tilt the electoral scales in favor of Biden.
On November 6, 2020, as it became increasingly clear that the election was inexplicably slipping away from Donald Trump, Whitney Quesenbery, a director at CTCL, seemed to exult in the knowledge that her organization’s work to increase absentee vote by mail had another effect beyond allowing “safer” voting during Covid: it was part of a carefully designed plan to defeat Trump and the alleged “fascists” who voted for him.
Quesenbery’s implication that Trump and his supporters are “fascists” appears in a social media post that involves a clever tribute to the folk musicians Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, with a replica of Guthrie’s famous slogan affixed to a mailbox rather than his acoustic guitar.
Vickie Selkow, manager of “Strategic Initiatives and Community Partnerships” for the city of Racine, Wisc., played a key role in organizing CTCL’s first major grant recipients, the Wisconsin five, and coordinating between their election offices and CTCL officials in July 2020. She continued in the vein of publicly equating Trump voters with an imaginary “fascist” threat in the United States, echoing the fevered claims of much of the far left in 2020.
On November 7, 2020, CTCL co-founder and director of government services Whitney May celebrated the election of President Joe Biden on Twitter, expressing a creepy anticipation of her desire to finally be “governed” by Biden.
During most of 2020 and 2021, CTCL founder and director Epps-Johnson consistently aligned with far-left partisan principles and personalities. Even subtle digital endorsements such as these are enough to make one wonder just how “nonpartisan” Epps-Johnson could be while presiding over the injection of $350 million of CTCL’s strings-attached, private election funding.
Items of note found in a cursory search of the @tianaej Twitter feed include:
Nov. 7, 2020 retweet of a BU professor calling the “legal vote” a functionally racist term.
Nov. 5, 2020 retweet “debunking” mis-information of conservative websites.
Dec. 2, 2020 retweet of a defense of “Defund the Police”.
Jan. 6, 2021 retweet calling for Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to immediately resign in the wake of the Capitol riots.
Feb. 1, 2021 retweet of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., call to cancel student debt through a Biden-Harris “executive order” as a workaround to legislative opposition.
May 19, 2021 retweet of a defense of critical race theory.
Do Look Now
Many mainstream conservative politicians and journalists continue to assert that questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election are “unfounded” and “baseless.” They are able to maintain that there is no evidence of electoral misconduct and a tainted election, mainly because they resolutely refuse to look for any such evidence, such as we present here and have presented elsewhere.
The most recent conservative apologetics for the “fairness” of the 2020 election comes from Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who has received cautious praise from a handful of other establishment conservatives who long for a return to “norms” and are concerned above all with protecting the legitimacy of an abstract set of failing institutions, rather than the interests of their own constituents.
But the evidence has become indisputable that some of the world’s richest and most powerful people, such as Zuckerberg, who control some its richest and most powerful institutions, conspicuously collaborated with far-left activists to gain control of the election machinery in areas that were critical to Biden’s 2020 election “victory,” and to bend it according to their will, and against the electoral preferences of tens of millions of legal voters.
How long can the faint-hearted, conservative establishment apologists for the highly improbable 2020 election — blinded by their contempt for Trump and his voters, and embarrassed by their incompetence in allowing such a thing to happen — continue to look the other way to avoid seeing what has been going on right under their noses?
