The Breitbart funder Mercer's are liars and America hating traitors.

Rightists are their useful idiots, not their allies.

How one billionaire family bankrolled election lies, white nationalism �
and the Capitol riot Rebekah Mercer is �one of the chief financiers of
the
fascist movement,� says longtime GOP insider Steve Schmidt

Four years before Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pumped his fist to a
supportive
mob that would soon overrun the Capitol Police and hunt lawmakers through
the halls of Congress, the former Missouri attorney general needed a
deep-pocketed patron. Naturally, he called on the man who helped bankroll
former President Donald Trump's rise: hedge-fund billionaire Robert
Mercer, whom he would soon describe as a friend while name-dropping him
to
court support from far-right figures like Steve Bannon, a longtime Mercer
ally. It's unclear what came of Hawley's meeting with Mercer, but the
Club
for Growth, which has received millions from the Mercer family, and the
Senate Conservatives Fund, which also got Mercer donations, quickly
became
Hawley's biggest financial backers, by far. Mercer's daughter Rebekah
kicked in a near-maximum donation to his 2018 Senate campaign for good
measure.

While Charles Koch and his late brother David have dominated Republican
fundraising in recent decades, the Mercers' recent strategic investments
in far-right candidates bought them a disproportionate level of influence
in the Republican Party before culminating in an effort to subvert the
election that fueled the deadly Capitol siege. Advertisement:

"The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution," Bannon told
The New Yorker in 2017. "Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the
past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody,
including the Kochs." Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and
co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, sees it differently.
Rebekah
Mercer, he said in an interview with Salon, is the "chief financier or
one
of the chief financiers of the fascist movement, and that's what it is."

Hours after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, killing five people
and
injuring dozens of police officers in a futile bid to stop the counting
of
electoral votes, Hawley joined with top Mercer beneficiaries in objecting
to the results to back Trump's "big lie" that the election was somehow
stolen. There was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose super PAC got $13.5
million from the Mercers during the 2016 presidential campaign � before
the family dropped another $15.5 million to back Trump. There was House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., defending the majority of the
GOP House caucus voting to overturn legal election results after his
Congressional Leadership Fund received $1.5 million from the Mercers. And
there was Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who received $21,600 from the Mercers
before speaking at the rally that preceded the riot and objecting to the
results. Brooks was later named by "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali
Alexander as having helped orchestrate the event, though his office said
he has "no recollection communicating in any way with whoever Ali
Alexander is." Advertisement:

Alexander himself may have benefited from the Mercers' millions while
working for the Black Conservative Fund, a small and mysterious group
that
received $60,000 from Robert Mercer in 2016. Though the group did not
raise any money in 2020, it promoted the White House rally to tens of
thousands of followers, according to CNBC.

The Mercers funded numerous key players who helped foment the Jan. 6
insurrection, though their full involvement remains unclear. Along with
far-right candidates and groups, they have also funded the far-right
social network Parler, which was used to coordinate the Capitol siege,
and
Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct London-based data firm that stole
Facebook user data to help Trump's 2016 campaign target potential voters.

"As I discovered first-hand, the Mercers are exceptionally skillful at
obfuscating and masking their political enterprises," David Carroll, a
professor at The New School in Manhattan who sued Cambridge Analytica for
his data in London, said in an email to Salon. "I marveled at how their
ownership of Cambridge Analytica was effectively shielded from the U.K.
courts where they were prosecuted." Advertisement:

Now that the Mercers have survived the scrutiny of the Federal Trade
Commission and former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation,
Carroll added, "I would assume the family has doubled-down on investing
in
its own privacy."

Schmidt agreed that "it's hard to keep track of the money" the Mercers
have doled out to their pet causes.

"In this movement, the money is a fundamentally important part of it. It
fuels the movement and that movement is an extremist movement," he said.
"Is there a better than even chance that the Mercer money is flowing,
like
so many tributaries, right into a larger seditious stream on this? Of
course there is."

Lax laws surrounding dark money donated to nonprofit entities mean it
will
likely be "several years before the public will have a complete sense of
how much the Mercers spent," wrote The Intercept's Matthew
Cunningham-Cook.

Publicly available data shows that the Mercers helped fund numerous
players who pushed the "big lie." The family donated $3.8 million to
Citizens United, which is run by longtime Trump adviser David Bossie, who
was tapped to lead the former president's legal challenges. Though the
Mercers have pulled back their financial support in recent election
cycles
amid growing scrutiny, they donated $300,000 during this past cycle to
the
Republican National Committee, which joined Trump's legal battle.
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The Mercers were also the top donors to Arizona Republican Party
chairwoman Kelli Ward, a devoted Trump loyalist, The Intercept reported
last week. Ward joined the lawsuit led by the Republican attorney general
of Texas that sought to overturn the results of the election in multiple
states and spoke at a December rally that featured Alexander to push
Trump's election conspiracy theories. On Twitter, Ward promoted her
appearance at a "Stop the Steal" rally alongside former national security
adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the
election, and posted the hashtag "#CrossTheRubicon," a phrase that refers
to Julius Caesar marching his army into Rome to declare himself a
dictator. The Arizona GOP also promoted Alexander's tweets, which
included
his declaration that he was "willing to give up my life for this fight."

"Live for nothing, or die for something," the party tweeted about a month
before the Capitol riot.

More recently, Rebekah Mercer co-founded Parler, ostensibly a
"libertarian" moderation-free social network that quickly became a
megaphone for far-right figures like Alexander and fellow organizer Alex
Jones, both of whom had been banned from mainstream social networks for
spreading disinformation. Alexander, Jones and others used Parler to
spread falsehoods about the election while others simply trafficked in
white supremacist content, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
"Holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry are
also easy to find," the ADL said. Advertisement:

Parler was used by some of the Capitol rioters to plan and coordinate the
attack. The site was briefly taken offline by Amazon before finding a new
host, though its apps have been removed from the Apple and Google app
stores. Rebekah Mercer said in a Parler post that she started the social
network to combat the "increasing tyranny" of our "tech overlords,"
slamming mainstream social networks over "data mining" � which is exactly
what the Mercers' former company, Cambridge Analytica, exploited to steal
Facebook users' personal data to help Trump in 2016. Although Mercer
touted Parler's protection of user data, hackers were able to easily gain
access to unsecured user data, which showed that Parler users had
penetrated deep inside the Capitol and shared videos and photos of their
crimes.

Before Trump, the family for years bankrolled Breitbart News, formerly
run
by Steve Bannon, who affectionately termed it the platform of the
alt-right. Along with Breitbart, which received a $10 million investment
from the family, the Mercers also funded Bannon projects like Glittering
Steel, a film production company, and the Government Accountability
Institute, whose president authored the anti-Hillary bestseller "Clinton
Cash" and later pushed discredited conspiracy theories about Joe Biden
and
his son Hunter's work overseas. Bannon's appointment to Trump's White
House, after Rebekah Mercer pushed for him to take over Trump's campaign,
was celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party. Though Bannon
fell out with Trump after a few months in the White House, both he and
Breitbart aggressively pushed Trump's false narrative following the
election. Advertisement: