Armed with industry propaganda, a dark money group has drawn a straight line from a liberal billionaire to the death of coal towns.
The fact that such a link doesn’t exist hasn’t stopped nascent conservative nonprofit Power the Future from launching a website devoted to the claim that wealthy Democratic donor Tom Steyer has singlehandedly destroyed communities throughout the country by giving money to environmental groups like Sierra Club. With a wave to the Great Depression’s Hoovervilles, shantytowns for the unemployed, Power the Future named its propaganda site Steyerville.
“Steyer’s activism has consequences, and it’s visible in these towns,” Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner told conservative news outlet the Washington Free Beacon. “… This is all on his hands. We will make him own it.”
Steyer, who lives in San Francisco, ran the hedge fund Farallon Capital until 2012, when he left to focus on politics and political giving. During the 2016 election cycle, he gave Democratic politicians and environmental causes $65 million. Along with liberal NextGen America, Steyer founded Need to Impeach, a Super PAC that runs ads calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Steyer also has given Stanford and Yale universities funds for energy research.
Ironically, Power the Future has a link to two of Steyer’s conservative counterparts – the Koch brothers. Turner, who founded the nonprofit, worked previously for the Charles Koch Institute, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Power the Future is not a traditional 501(c)(3) nonprofit, like Red Cross. Instead, the organization formed as a 501(c)(4), a type of nonprofit that can participate in politics if it doesn’t devote more than half of its funds to political spending. 501(c)(4)s may attempt to influence elections through advertising, but unlike super PACs, they don’t have to disclose their donors.
That means Power the Future doesn’t have to share where its money came from – the same money that’s being spent on the Steyerville site and upcoming anti-Steyer ads. The organization’s website says it is funded by individuals, not corporations.
I went over the claims and data on one of the so-called Steyerville communities – Belmont County, Ohio. Although most of the numbers the site uses are correct, a lot of the data is used inaccurately or in a misleading way. None of the data or news articles Power the Future uses prove a direct connection between Steyer (or any other political donor) and economic issues in Belmont County.
For instance, Power the Future shows Belmont County’s unemployment rate going up from 5.4 percent in 2014 to 7.1 percent in January of this year. The site leaves out that a month later, it dropped to 6.6 percent.
More importantly, looking at the unemployment rate for Belmont County over time shows that it was way worse in 2010, when it peaked at 13.8 percent.
Power the Future also uses several articles to point out economic decline without telling the whole story. The site links to a story on Belmont County’s declining coal industry, omitting the impacts of regulation and alternative energy sources, including wind, solar and natural gas, all of which are cheaper than coal.
The biggest whopper, though, was that the Sierra Club was killing economic development in Belmont County. As evidence, Power the Future mentioned that the Sierra Club spoke in opposition to a proposed Belmont County petrochemical plant last month, which is a far cry from blocking construction of the factory.
The issues with Power the Future’s information weren’t especially surprising, but what did surprise me was the energy spent on attacking someone who isn’t running for office. This isn’t new for Steyer, though.
The Republican Governors Association, the super PAC American Crossroads and the nonprofit Crossroads GPS ran ads attacking Steyer as one of his PACs, NextGen Climate Action Committee, donated to midterm elections in 2014.
The goal with Steyerville may be to whip up donations for the GOP – or Power the Future, for that matter. But as Sean Sullivan noted in The Washington Post, “Turning behind-the-scenes players into central figures is difficult when so many Americans have no idea who these people are.”
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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