“What you’re about to see will make you uncomfortable and angry.” That’s the promise from investigative journalist James O’Keefe at the outset of his latest video exposé. The Project Veritas production reveals the “dark backroom dealings of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.”
Titled “Rigging the Election,” the video adds substance to recent claims by Donald Trump. It excerpts numerous undercover videos in which Democrat operatives describe illegal collaboration between left-wing PACs, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign. Read Debra Heine’s breakdown for the details.
The initial outrage over these revelations, while justified, focuses on the wrong aspects. Yes, Hillary Clinton is corrupt. Yes, the DNC is ruthless. Yes, all these people are despicable. But all of that is beside the point.
The real problems highlighted in the video are systematic. Our election laws are intentionally fashioned to rig the process, a rigging hidden in plain sight. It’s done through two complementary means, campaign finance laws and public sector unions.
In the video, Democrat operatives speak openly of circumventing or outright breaking campaign finance laws. This revelation should surprise no one. Of course political operatives talk shop with each other, as Americans United for Change field director Scott Foval describes. Why wouldn’t they? Because it’s illegal? So was drinking alcohol during Prohibition, but that only stopped those who cared about the law. If you wanted to drink, you drank. Further, when you drank with others, everyone kept the mutual secret.
That’s one of the major problems with campaign finance laws. People with common interests are going to share information and work together. We can ban such activity all we want, but that just pushes it into the dark. The only people hindered by campaign finance laws are those few sincere folk who make a good faith effort to comply with the law. I say “good faith” because illegal collaboration is as easy as a talk over drinks, as Foval describes. Every incentive exists to both break the law, and cover for allies who are likewise breaking it. You would have to be utterly incompetent to get caught, or be the target of an undercover investigation like the one we have here.
The net effect of campaign finance law is institutional corruption, which is precisely the opposite of what we’re told. Rather than end the influence of money in politics, campaign finance laws merely push it into the shadows. If it weren’t illegal to collaborate in political endeavors, such operations might be done openly. Or they might not. Either way, at least everyone would be on an even playing field instead of granting the electoral edge to criminals.
Another irony of campaign finance laws manifests in the video. The left sells such restrictions as limitations on the influence of fat-cat donors, the dreaded 1%. But the real money in politics comes from unions, particularly public sector unions. That’s why they’re able to pay a guy like Aaron Black to run a full-time astroturf bird-dog operation. Those of us on the right can feign indignation if we want; but we’d be doing the same thing if we had the money to pay people. We don’t, because we actually have to go out and raise it while the left benefits from their coercive union scheme.
Campaign finance laws are all about hobbling opposition to the left. That’s all such laws have ever been about. The left coasts on funds siphoned by hard-working union employees, then prevents individuals and corporations from funding any sort of organized resistance. That is how the election is rigged, not through some sort of esoteric voter fraud, but through legal and institutional means. To un-rig it, we must abolish campaign finance laws and outlaw public sector unions, among other things.
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