Farewell FreedomWorks
Yet another legacy right-wing organization goes belly up in the Trump era.
FreedomWorks, a right-wing group brought to you by the Koch Brothers and the organization behind popularizing and funding the Tea Party, folded this week after its board voted to dissolve. In an interview with Politico, current president Adam Brandon blamed Donald Trump and his MAGA coalition.
After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.
“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base, and that just kind of shifted.”
As someone who attended more than her fair share of Tea Party events and watched still more of them online in 2009, I had to laugh at the notion that Donald Trump was the reason for the shift. The Tea Party was branded as a populist political movement by FreedomWorks. It was supposed to be a hub for the more populist wing of the GOP.
That populism led to electoral success for the Republican Party. Tea Party candidates elected in 2010 and 2012 paved the way for Donald Trump and his MAGA coalition. Trump undoubtedly tapped into the localized Tea Party infrastructure organized and funded by FreedomWorks as a candidate in 2016. Without FreedomWorks and the Tea Party, there is no President Trump.
Or as Dave Karpf, a friend and political scientist who studies modern organizing, put it when I asked: “Trump turned a lot of their [The Tea Party] subtext into text and was a more entertaining populist demagogue than Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy. So, the movement conservatives, conservative media, and conservative megadonors all went along with him. And that left nothing for FreedomWorks to do if its leaders wanted to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Trump cronies. It's a real leopard's-eating-faces-party moment.”
Reading Adam Brandon’s interview, it sounds like he, and at least some of FreedomWorks’ donors, aren’t exactly thrilled with how it all turned out. Brandon had already attempted to rebrand FreedomWorks as a more moderate organization, writing in a letter to donors that for the independent voters he was now trying to reach, “gay marriage is a settled issue. Concerning abortion, they believe the old adage that the issue should be safe, legal, and rare. What appeals to the partisan base does not appeal to this demographic. This demographic is rejecting the Democratic message, but they aren’t taking to the Republican message.” Obviously, the rebrand was not a success.
FreedomWorks is now another casualty in the Trump takeover of the Republican party. Joining Project Veritas in the wingnut-welfare graveyard. As a reminder, the GOP itself is flailing with state Republican parties in complete disarray and the national Republican party committees trailing their Democratic counterparts in fundraising. Trump might have complete control over his party, but it comes at the cost of the infrastructure that got him over the finish line in 2016.
The Right’s crumbling infrastructure is part of why I think Biden will win reelection in November, but it also doesn’t mean that Trump and the MAGA coalition are doomed. As Tess Owen reported in Wired earlier this month, right-wing militias are once again coordinating with one another out in the open on platforms like Facebook. I’ve long maintained that the Right isn’t trying to win elections but to seize power, and while I wouldn’t make the argument that the end of FreedomWorks is connected to a rise in militias organizing again, I will say that both happenings point to that the MAGA Right is evolving.
ICYMI
The Real “Outside Agitators” of These Protests Are Members of Congress (The New Republic)
I appreciate this op-ed for its connective tissue between the response to campus protests now, and what stunts Elise Stefanik and her colleagues were pulling earlier this year.
Conspiracy Theories Matter, but Not All Are Meaningful: a Guide for Analyzing Risks to Audiences (Institute for Strategic Dialogue)
This is a helpful guide for anyone thinking about when and when not to respond to conspiracies. A handy primer for reporters and advocates alike.
Katy Perry’s Own Mom Was Fooled By That Viral AI-Generated Image Of The Star At This Year’s Met Gala (Buzzfeed)
Count me as one of the many fooled by this image. Perry didn’t actually attend the event this year, but anyone casually scrolling on Twitter for Met Gala looks was an easy mark for this one.
In Arizona, Election Workers Trained With Deepfakes to Prepare for 2024 (Washington Post)
I really want to take this training myself!
Coda
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That’s all for this week. Thanks so much for reading and supporting the newsletter. I appreciate you, and I’ll see you again next Sunday.
Maga is the Frankenstein monster the GOP created by deferring to the principles of winning by stirring up the base and "owning the libs" above all else. We can only hope it destroys itself and the GOP before it destroys the country.