‘Zuck Bucks’ Need To Be Stopped Cold

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

It is less than 90 days to Election Day, and right on queue the group behind the “Zuck Bucks” campaign of 2020 is back with a new scheme. This time, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is doling out millions in grant dollars to rural election administrators in 19 states.

Election officers beware. The group is trying to turn the government offices that run elections into bastions of partisan progressive activism. Election officials striving for nonpartisanship should steer clear.

CTCL rose to prominence during the unprecedented election of 2020. The group got $350 million from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which it then funneled disproportionately to swing-state communities that ultimately voted for Joe Biden.

Racine, Wisconsin used its CTCL money to purchase a mobile voting van that in 2022 it deployed to heavily Democrat areas of the city to register voters and collect ballots. Earlier this year, a judge declared that illegal.

After 2020, a majority of states moved to ban or restrict private funding for running election offices, including several on a bipartisan basis. This year, Wisconsin voters approved two constitutional amendments to ban private funding after the scope of CTCL’s involvement was revealed. Even Mark Zuckerberg announced he would no longer back the group’s grants.

But that did not stop CTCL. Instead, it created “Zuck Bucks 2.0,” an $80 million program called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence.

Now, CTCL is offering grants to rural counties, saying it is merely helping cash-strapped offices on the eve of a contentious election. Sound familiar?

The sudden interest in flyover country is laughable. In 2020, rural areas got token grants of just $5,000 while urban areas got millions. CTCL claimed that big cities have more voters and therefore need more money. Subsequent analyses showed that blue counties got far money more per voter than red counties.

Perhaps CTCL hopes this move can insulate it against criticism that it is once again influencing elections. Not so fast. Reports indicate that CTCL is setting aside $2.5 million for rural grants.

CTCL is giving $3 million to Clark County, Nevada, for this election cycle alone. Add in the huge grants offered to heavily Democrat DeKalb County, Georgia and Madison, Wisconsin, and CTCL has given nearly three times the grants to just these heavily Democrat areas (located in swing states, no less) than hundreds of rural counties could get combined.

In fairness, CTCL is not wrong that rural areas often need additional resources. But those funds should come from state and local taxpayers, not partisan groups pushing an agenda.

And make no mistake, CTCL has a political agenda. Though it claims to be nonpartisan, it’s founder and executive director is a former Obama Foundation fellow and used to work at a group the Washington Post once labeled the “Democratic party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.” CTCL’s donors are just as left-wing, with major liberal organizations like the Skoll Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund footing its bills.

Small wonder, then, that by this April 28 states had banned or restricted CTCL-style private funding. Over the last few years, residents in communities from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Brunswick County, North Carolina, have opposed election administrators joining ranks with such a partisan group. Ottawa County, Michigan, declined to accept $1.5 million in CTCL funds with the county clerk explaining that accepting the grant could compromise public confidence in elections.

Over the next few months, CTCL will offer hundreds of rural counties “free” money. Many may feel inclined to take it. Before they do, they should know who they are doing business with.

Rural election offices may need additional funding, but turning to partisan groups like CTCL just puts public trust in elections at risk. County officials should treat CTCL’s latest offer of “free” money the way they would treat a windowless van hanging a sign marked “free candy:”

Stay away and warn your friends.

Jason Snead is the Executive Director of Honest Elections Project Action.

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Biden-Harris Admin’s EV Coercion Campaign Hasn’t Really Gone All That Well

Published on October 31, 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The future direction of federal energy policy related to the transportation sector is a key question that will be determined in one way or another by the outcome of the presidential election. What remains unclear is the extent of change that a Trump presidency would bring.

Given that Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is a major supporter of former President Donald Trump, it seems unlikely a Trump White House would move to try to end the EV subsidies and tax breaks included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those provisions, of course, constitute the “carrot” end of the Biden-Harris carrot-and-stick suite of policies designed to promote the expansion of EVs in the U.S. market.

The “stick” side of that approach comes in the form of stricter tailpipe emissions rules and higher fleet auto-mileage requirements imposed on domestic carmakers. While a Harris administration would likely seek to impose even more federal pressure through such command-and-control regulatory measures, a Trump administration would likely be more inclined to ease them.

But doing that is difficult and time-consuming and much would depend on the political will of those Trump appoints to lead the relevant agencies and departments.

Those and other coercive EV-related policies imposed during the Biden-Harris years have been designed to move the U.S. auto industry directionally to meet the administration’s stated goal of having EVs make up a third of the U.S. light duty fleet by 2030. The suite of policies does not constitute a hard mandate per se but is designed to produce a similar pre-conceived outcome.

It is the sort of heavy-handed federal effort to control markets that Trump has spoken out against throughout his first term in office and his pursuit of a second term.

A new report released this week by big energy data and analytics firm Enverus seems likely to influence prospective Trump officials to take a more favorable view of the potential for EVs to grow as a part of the domestic transportation fleet. Perhaps the most surprising bit of news in the study, conducted by Enverus subsidiary Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), is a projection that EVs are poised to be lower-priced than their equivalent gas-powered models as soon as next year, due to falling battery costs.

“Battery costs have fallen rapidly, with 2024 cell costs dipping below $100/kWh. We predict from [2025] forward EVs will be more affordable than their traditional, internal combustible engine counterparts,” Carson Kearl, analyst at EIR, says in the release. Kearl further says that EIR expects the number of EVs on the road in the US to “exceed 40 million (20%) by 2035 and 80 million (40%) by 2040.”

The falling battery costs have been driven by a collapse in lithium prices. Somewhat ironically, that price collapse has in turn been driven by the failure of EV expansion to meet the unrealistic goal-setting mainly by western governments, including the United States. Those same cause-and-effect dynamics would most likely mean that prices for lithium, batteries and EVs would rise again if the rapid market penetration projected by EIR were to come to fruition.

In the U.S. market, the one and only certainty of all of this is that something is going to have to change, and soon. On Monday, Ford Motor Company reported it lost another $1.2 billion in its Ford Model e EV division in the 3^rd quarter, bringing its accumulated loss for the first 9 months of 2024 to $3.7 billion.

Energy analyst and writer Robert Bryce points out in his Substack newsletter that that Model e loss is equivalent to the $3.7 billion profit Ford has reported this year in its Ford Blue division, which makes the company’s light duty internal combustion cars and trucks.

While Tesla is doing fine, with recovering profits and a rising stock price amid the successful launch of its CyberTruck and other new products, other pure-play EV makers in the United States are struggling to survive. Ford’s integrated peers GM and Stellantis have also struggled with the transition to more EV model-heavy fleets.

None of this is sustainable, and a recalibration of policy is in order. Next Tuesday’s election will determine which path the redirection of policy takes.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Trump Reportedly Told Netanyahu Israel Needs To Finish Gaza War By Time He Takes Office

Published on October 31, 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Adam Pack

Former President Donald Trump reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he wins a second term Israel’s war in Gaza needs to be finished by the time he takes office in January, The Times of Israel (TOI) reported.

Israel went to war with Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing conflict has left the terrorist group crippled and swaths of the Gaza enclave in ruins. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Israel’s efforts to wipe out Hamas, but has expressed that he wants the war to end in short order, telling Netanyahu in July that it needs to be over by the start of 2025, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told TOI.

The message was relayed to Netanyahu during the prime minister’s visit to Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, the sources told TOI. While Netanyahu’s trip to Mar-a-Lago was widely reported on at the time, this is the first occasion it has been reported that Trump said this during the visit.

Trump didn’t go into specifics with Netanyahu about his request, so it’s possible he would support “residual” Israeli military activity in Gaza, a former U.S. official told TOI. Trump also wants Israel to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza — some of which are American citizens — before he takes office in January.

Relations between Trump and Netanyahu were icy after Trump lost the 2020 election. Netanyahu congratulated President Joe Biden following that election in a video message, angering Trump. Trump also felt at the time Netanyahu wasn’t serious about resolving tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

But the two have seemingly mended relations this year. They have spoken on several occasions since Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago in July. Netanyahu has said that Trump had called him two days in a row recently.

However, Trump has said on multiple occasions that Israel’s war in Gaza needs to end quickly because it has devasted the enclave and the Palestinian population living there, raising concerns among Israeli officials, two Israeli officials told TOI earlier this month. While Israel’s military operations in Gaza have largely ended, the government doesn’t yet seem comfortable with withdrawing entirely — especially given concerns that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, widely seen as a corrupt governing body, will fill the power vacuum.

Despite Trump’s wishes, there are some hardliners in Netanyahu’s orbit who have threatened to oust the prime minister from power if he ends the war.

“A fight with Trump is something he hasn’t really had to deal with, and I think it’s something he’d want to avoid, but [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir may not let him,” a Knesset member told TOI.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.