Saturday, April 27, 2019

Andrew Scheer and the Koch Brothers' Connection



When Andrew Scheer had that secret meeting with some Big Oil bosses at a fancy hotel just outside Calgary the other day, he must have been praying up a storm that nobody would ever find out about it.

Never find out what they talked about, never find out who was there.

But sadly for him, the Globe exposed the meeting, as nothing less than a sinister conclave, or war council, on how to best destroy Justin Trudeau and his Liberals. 

So now Scheer has a big problem.



How to make that sinister meeting look like a noble enterprise, or crusade.

Or just another day at the office. 

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer didn't have much to say Thursday about a private conference he held with oil executives earlier this month to iron out a plan to boot the Liberals from government. 

 "I meet with people all the time. I meet with different representatives of many different types of industries," Scheer told HuffPost Canada after some pre-election door knocking in an Ottawa suburb.

While avoiding at all cost having to explain what a man like Mike Roman was doing at that meeting.

The day's agenda included a litigation session hosted by Mike Roman, who used to lead the Koch network research unit before finding work in the White House as a Trump administration operative.

The Republican operative so secretive he's practically invisible... 



So it's almost impossible to find a photograph of him, let alone determine what exactly he did for Donald Trump. 

“Within the research world, he cultivates this ‘man of the world’ mystery,” said one former administration official. “Like, he was the guy who you would talk to if you want to find a Hungarian hacker in Hong Kong.”

Although we do know that he has some strong views on elections.

Election monitoring, concerns about voter fraud and Election Day poll monitoring have long been a passion of Roman’s and the primary focus of his blog, with entries dating as far back as 2008. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post.

As well as a deeply disturbing past.

Roman also attracted notice a decade ago for disseminating a 2008 YouTube video showing two members of the New Black Panther Party, dressed in black with berets and one carrying a nightstick, milling around a North Philadelphia polling station — a video that ended up being played on a loop on the Fox News Network that year, personifying conservative fears about voter intimidation.

Having among other things, once disseminated a video that was an early version of so-called fake news.

And of course we also know, that Roman has a documented record of faithful and secretive service to the Koch brothers.  



Roman, who did not respond to requests for comment, has worked to keep himself and his activity low-profile even within the discreet Koch operation.

One former network official said that when people were summoned to meetings at ASG’s offices, they sometimes had trouble finding the suite. “They told people that’s the way they liked it,” the official recalled. “They act all cloak and dagger – like the CIA. There was a joke about how hardly anyone ever met Mike Roman. It was like, if you wanted to find him, he’d be in a trench coat on the National Mall,” said the former official.

Which can only raise some deeply disturbing questions. 

Starting with this one: 

What was a man like Roman doing at that secret meeting, with all those Con operatives, Big Oil bosses, and Andrew Scheer?

What did Scheer's ex-Rebel campaign manager Hamish Marshall, who once specialized in producing multiple websites for Ezra Levant's hate mongering site, take away from that meeting?



Did Marshall talk about his plan to bypass the media?

Beyond surveying supporters’ news diet, the mail-out asks whether the party should “bypass” the news media and instead hone “an aggressive social media strategy to communicate with people directly in their homes or on their mobile devices” and whether the party “should focus on direct voter contact … that will allow us to take our message to voters unfiltered.”

It also asks whether the campaign should prioritize local and community media outlets, and invest more in advertising and a “sophisticated ground game” in order to “counter the efforts of pro-media news organizations.”

Which could increase the amount of fake news, and along with all those far right-wing   bots that are sprouting up everywhere, confuse Canadians and suppress the vote.

And of course, I have the biggest question of all:

Will the Cons and their Big Oil buddies, their Republican hitmen and their Trumpling toadies try to steal the election?



I can't understand why most of our shabby media is all but ignoring this story, when unlike the fake scandal it's a real scandal that threatens our democracy.

But what I do know is that if we don't expose the Con's dirty American games

And unite to defeat them.

In less than six weeks, we could lose our Canada...

14 comments:

Jackie Blue said...

Six months* ! If it was only six weeks I'd be really scared! (And I am as it is already!)

Simon, can you send this to someone in the Liberal Party? Trudeau himself, or Gould, or contact Elections Canada with what you've uncovered about Roman? Someone at the Toronto Star?

Because I can understand why the rest of the shabby media is ignoring it. They're bought off and corrupt!

Anonymous said...

The following 2015 article completely explains the bizarre anti climate change rhetoric the Scheer Cons are promoting. It has nothing to do with Albertan jobs or some twisted belief that our climate future is in Gods hands so profit while you can. No its at least 90% about the fact the Koch brothers have dibs on anywhere from 1.1 to 2 million acres of prime oil sands real estate and don't want to see it turned into a conservation park. The king makers must be really pissed that Trudeau and the Liberals unseated the great oily messiah in 2015 and have vowed to do whats necessary so that it is not repeated in 2019. It also explains the organized rather expensive anti Trudeau propaganda that has permeated social media and the MSM $ per click followers for the past 3 years. Canada is completely unprepared for the type of psychological propaganda this amount of US based manipulative experience and money can buy. The only potential salvation is that their focus is on exploiting the tar sands which means trashing climate change and building pipelines. Canadians can be easily fooled by anti immigrant, corruption and out of control debt propaganda but denying the existence of climate change and promoting pipelines as our savior will be a little more difficult. It will be interesting to see how Scheer manages this, in typical weasel fashion it is likely he will present his golly gee 'how dare you accuse me of being a waaambulance chaser' face to the media and let the propaganda machine wage the anti climate war on social media.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/05/04/news/how-canada-made-koch-brothers-rich

RT

Jackie Blue said...

Did you see that savage heckler (probably a Hamish plant) in Ontario, where Justin brought Xavier and Hadrien to help out with flood damage? God, those poor kids. I feel so bad for them. My heart aches for this family every single day and what they have had to endure. What they will continue to be faced with the rest of their lives, just like the Clintons and Obamas. The children, even. Every single day I just want to give them all a big cross-border hug and let them know there are still people -- especially in America -- who still love and respect them. We know all about the dirty tricks that RethugliCons do and we don't buy it for a minute. Joe Biden remarked fondly of America "as an idea" and there are lots of us who believe in the truly Canadian spirit too.

Simon, would you please share with your followers the letter I sent to him in February, about all the bullying he and his family receive on a daily basis? And some key Liberal people like Rob Silver and Amanda Alvaro. I blacked out my real name, but let them know this is by an American regular at your blog who is deeply, deeply concerned about the turn Canada is taking and the open hostility to the family Trudeau. We love them, even if the hatemongers don't. They're the closest thing to a modern-day "Canalot."

https://imgur.com/a/l5Niivv

Anonymous said...

I would hope, no, damn well expect someone within the Liberal party will launch a probe into who is funding the Con's propaganda machine and while they're at it, the rebel. Be it elections Canada or better yet, use the Cons favorite method of attacking Libs, launch an inquiry into who is meddling in our elections. Do extensive audits and reveal what we already suspect.
Low information Canadians are being duped by the Con's constant lies on every serious issue we face and to have outside influences flushing their bullshit into Scheer's reeking sewage system leaves us in a state of bullshit overload. Gaming the system in the Cons favour so these billionaires can get richer at our expense is wrong on every level and should be illegal if not so already. It is no different than Russia interfering to help elect Trump. We now see how that worked out. Trump has done nothing to stop Russian interference or criticize them because he knows it helps him. There's a means to an end by puttin' Putin's pocket rocket right up Trump's fat ass and Donnie has bent over forwards to accomodate him. Now Putin has his useful idiot in Washington and the Kochs and Mercers and surely Putin have Scheer kneeling before them hoping he can become their useful idiot in Ottawa.
It sickens me to see how money corrupts people and the lengths they will go to in their insatiable quest for more riches. They are parasites, a plague on fairness and decency, a disease to any and all democratic institutions while hastening this planet's demise. We are nothing more to them than an X on a ballot. Vote for us and we promise you the moon, after we take our 99%.
JD

Anonymous said...

I saw the heckler as well, Jackie. Complaining he needed help and that JT was just there for the photo-op. I'm thinking the guy wasn't being helped because he proved on camera that he's an asshole and there were many appreciative home owners that deserved the help more than this hateful prick.
JD

Steve said...

The KOCK bros own the tar sands.

John B. said...

I know there are a lot of latter-day lefties and even some old-timers who don't agree, but I follow dad's rule: keep the kids out of it and keep them off the picket line.

brawnfire said...

It's all very worrying.
For example, read this disturbing Post I read yesterday on ProgBlog, and see what I mean. Makes you wonder, too?
"Who is really running the show in Ontario?"
https://politicsanditsdiscontents.blogspot.com/2019/04/who-is-really-running-show-in-ontario.html
Then, there's both the Star and the Globe's headlines-- OPINION PIECES (as distinguished from NEWS), this morning:
Blue Conservative wave keeps rolling across Canada
Trudeau fatigue, not Conservatism, is sweeping the country

Meanwhile barely a week ago I seem to recall watching, and then reading actual NEWS regarding Trudeau's Cambridge Town Hall, that "People arrived from across Waterloo region, Brantford, Guelph and as far as Oxford County and braved the rain for hours" in order to get in. (take a look at the map to appreciate the reach of his draw into one Secondary School auditorium)

Jackie Blue said...

Press Progress already reported that Mercer money underwrites Rebel's Islamophobic propaganda. In Jane Mayer's Dark Money she writes that the Koch boys were raised by a Nazi nanny while the old man went around raking in billions and fomenting Bircher hate against dirty commie labor activists, immigrants, the usual "enemies." Fast forward some 60 years or so. Ezra Levant, the sellout kapo (who already had a reputation as a shit disturber at U of Calgary, where he invited the likes of none other than Doug Christie, slimy lawyer defending Holocaust deniers, to campus for debates on "free speech"), went to Koch sleepaway camp in the 1990s where he literally wrote the book on how to use the then-nascent Internet to cultivate a 21st-century Hitler youth. The book is called Youthquake and it forms the undercurrent for what later became Rebel Media with help from none other than Hamish Marshall. Those Gamergate incels in their MAGA dunce caps and their Proud Boy ilk, having a wank to Faith videos, attacking JT with their tiki torch brigade and shitposting memes from their mother's basements, are the end result. Koch klan krap is so deeply embedded in the CRAP coalition -- Canada's clone of the GOP -- that it's inextricable from its DNA.

Note that the Mercers themselves were once part of the Koch umbrella organization -- again, as detailed in Jane Mayer's excellent and disturbing exposé. Mercer's career centers pretty much around his time as an emotionless engineer at IBM -- a company that, itself, was one of the American industrial powerhouses that aided and abetted the Holocaust. (See Edwin Black's bestseller IBM & The Holocaust for further details.) His modern-day heirs are none other than Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian (founder of the utterly deplorable cesspool that is Reddit, who somehow conned Serena Williams into marrying him and having a daughter), whoever's in charge of Google aka "Alphabet Agency" now -- the Proud Boys of Silicon Valley. Revenge of the nerds, rise of the machines. At least Bill Gates has reformed himself and now uses his Microsoft money to help people in Africa. I can't see such a philanthropic epiphany ever happening for the multi-billionaire shitpost kings of Menlo Park.

All of this is public information. The problem is nobody bothers to look into it including the corrupt, corporate M$M. Like you said, the love of money is the root of all evil. Mussolini himself said fascism is the merger of corporations and government. But it's not only money. There's a sinister sadism these types get off on about abusing the "other." Scheer won't use the words directly because he knows exactly what he is: an agent of white supremacy. To the Cons and their wealthy enablers, Trudeau isn't just a roadblock to their resource wealth. He's a "race traitor," as was his father. Guess who's coming to give a talk in Ottawa next month: Harper's other nemesis -- and Trudeau's bromance buddy -- Barack Obama. Gee, I wonder why the closet apartheid sympathizer got along so poorly with the American Mandela? I'm sure it must have been about his healthcare policy. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

The Cons have dehumanized the "other" enough that they in turn dehumanize anyone willing to help them. I believe it was Goebbels himself who said "a Jew is who I say he is." The tone and the rhetoric in their bloodthirsty attacks points to the obvious conclusion: the Business Plot against Canada has made a direct target of "Justin Judeau." God save JT indeed.

Lithamoonsong said...

This meeting convinced me to change my vote from Green to Liberal, but, I want a few things in return, Trudeau must put electoral reform back on the table as well as ditch the pipeline, voting with my brain not my heart. But, we don't have a choice.

SS said...

Press Progress is the official agitprop organ of the NDP.

Anonymous said...

I saw that BS recently too. Another angry, old, white man thinking this whole thing is pie: if someone else wins equal rights or fair treatment, he loses. I feel I can say this because I'm old, white and male, but I certainly don't feel entitled to anything anymore.

Steve said...

the evil empire is ruling the world, and electoral reform is the only thing that will keep us on the left side of history.

Unknown said...

This is important info. The Koch brothers are responsible for the rise of extreme right-wing politicians around the world. Brexit, Trump etc are all connected. It's surprising and disappointing t more people are not aware of how they're being manipulated to give away they're human rights, safety, and freedom from persecution--nevermind creating a dumpster of are stressed planet.