Theory No More, Part Five: The Machine
Building a political machine from not-so-scrap government parts
The need for new methods of gathering intelligence arose with the new millenium, 9/11, and the passage of what then-Senator Joe Biden claimed largely to be his 2001 USA PATRIOT Act.
China had recently implemented structural economic reforms, international talent and academic exchanges, and a manufacturing base that dwarfed anywhere else in the world, bringing them racing.
The criminal justice reforms ushered in with the PATRIOT Act created a brand new niche technological industry for both the Chinese and American governments.
Luckily, plenty of well-connected Beltway elites were already in the business.
Chinese Coincidence
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), through the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Ministry of Education (MoE), launched a ceaseless stream of targeted, incentivized talent and scholar exchanges beginning as far back as the 1990’s.
These came to be known as the Hundred Talents Plans, Thousand Talents Plan, Overseas Scholars, and Foreign Experts programs, planned and approved directly by the central communist Chinese government.
The programs also coincided with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) opening an office in Beijing, mere blocks from China’s Silicon Valley in late 2005.
The shift in Chinese policies came coupled with a fundamental realignment of the relationship between the central U.S. government and academia as well.
In the private sector, companies like AT&T, Google, Boeing, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft were either establishing or further cementing their footholds in Mainland China...
...while universities like Arizona, Michigan, Michigan State, Pennsylvania, Purdue, Columbia, Southern California, UT-Austin, UC-Berkeley, MIT, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Universities were up to their ears in the aforementioned Chinese talent exchanges (just to name a few, to be sure).
During the courses of these exchanges and academic partnerships, the American private sector funded these same university departments, sending millions through the NSF, USAID, and even partnering with the Pentagon and its contractors directly.
Microsoft in 2010 awarded 13 schools an initial $5 million and its Azure cloud platform to collaborate across disciplines.
You can watch a trimmed (for time and emphasis) version of the NSF and Microsoft’s official announcement here:
The original can be found in full here.
In 2012, USAID and NSF launched their partnership, which brought together private capital, international cooperation and development, and academia under select, centralized programs.
Within these partnered schools were students and faculty who collaborated on research with students physically working from China, and even students from C9 League schools within American departments. This connection to the C9 League in itself indicates a high likelihood of a continued (airtight) connection to Mainland China.
DNC Reset After 2004 Defeat
After taking a shellacking in the 2004 Presidential election, megadonors like George Soros, long-time Clinton aide Harold Ickes, and Colorado software developer Tim Gill began funding a 21st century overhaul for the Democratic Party to keep pace with the Republicans.
Tim Gill’s predominantly LGBTQ-facing philanthropy took a political heel-turn when he hosted his Gill Foundation’s 2005 OutGiving Conference, started by a two hour seminar from Democracy Alliance CEO, Rob Stein.
Another major player in Democracy Alliance is an entire labor union — the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who represent healthcare, public sector, and service industry laborers.
In 2004, George Soros made a bee-line for Barack Obama as an Illinois state senator, and began bankrolling his political career.
Along with the Soros-Ickes duo, Jocelyn Benson jumped into a role establishing and building out an “election protection” program for the Party in 2004, while longtime D.C. staples like Laura Quinn, Jeffrey Crigler, and Michael Podhorzer built the digital capabilities and human infrastructure to influence those elections.
Everyone in leadership roles within Soros’ new, secretive coalition called “Democracy Alliance” brought an expertise, whether it were political connections, access to capital, or positions in leadership at top universities.
In 2005, Harold Ickes, a former Clinton aide, dumped $9 million into an “initiative” called Catalist, as Yochi Dreazen put it for the Wall Street Journal Online in 2006.
Another company within this “initiative” was Copernicus Analytics, who specialized in aggregating and analyzing very diverse data to predict voting trends.
Copernicus Analytics
Copernicus Analytics was founded by former DNC Communications Director Mark Steitz, and with his CEO, Laura Quinn, founded a news distribution company called QRS Newsmedia previously in 1996. Copernicus functioned early in Catalist’s history as an analytics arm for the company, but was effectively absorbed by 2012.
Steitz’s Copernicus was staffed by scientists and academics from universities like MIT, Harvard, and Michigan among others that crossed paths with the Chinese PLA-backed talent pipeline highlighted in the previous part of this series.
Found in the 2016 DC Leaks documents, Steitz purportedly spoke in 2012 at a U.S. Programs Board Meeting for the Soros Foundation in New York as an expert in “political testing,” and was invited to a private informal dinner to discuss current events at the home of George Soros on Fifth Avenue.
QRS Newsmedia
Laura Quinn’s QRS Newsmedia was founded in 1996 by Steitz and Quinn, and specialized in targeting local and regional newscasts from the days of broadcast television in order to disseminate messages to a national audience.
Brook Colangelo
QRS Newsmedia’s Director of Technology, Brook Colangelo, was with the company all the way up until he served as President Obama’s Chief Information Officer.
Colangelo would have been quietly at the center of President Obama’s Blackberry security controversy during the early days of his administration.
David McKeown
David McKeown was Copernicus Analytics’ comptroller and bounced between QRS, Copernicus, and Catalist through the years. His background with Booz Allen Hamilton brought him into the USAID, World Bank, and Pentagon orbits.
McKeown thus was an insider to the financial firehose of taxpayer-funded research to the universities that Catalist was partnered with, who in various ways crossed streams with researchers from high-risk Chinese universities.
Erik Brauner, Chief Architect
Now, Steitz and Quinn’s Catalist collects data from its partners and “cleans” it to be analyzed for research, but the data is first ingested raw nonetheless.
All of this data is acquired through “third parties,” and relies heavily on internet activity attached to a user.
This is a very important detail that will become a focus later.
Univeristy Collabs
Catalist supplied research data to a Caltech and MIT research project by Eitan Hersh through the Harvard Department of Government in 2010.
Inside the intricate webs of collaborations between schools and researchers, these schools intersect the Chinese alumni foundation ZUEF, from Part Three in this series.
Perkins Coie
A 2010 State of Washington, Perkins Coie-led report called, “Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders in Washington was published using Catalist’s voter data, showing how active the group was so early after the universities onboarding with Microsoft.
Cookies
In a November 3, 2012, National Journal feature, Catalist’s Laura Quinn bragged on their brand new analytics capabilities. For the pre-Internet of Things era, Catalist was among the first truly massive, commercialized “Big Data” undertakings in the world, dating all the way back to 2006 and the advent of cloud computing.
But how did Catalist (or Copernicus Analytics/QRS Newsmedia) have such cutting edge technology so early as 2006?
Yahir Ghitza
Yair Ghitza, Catalist’s current chief scientist, came immediately out of the University of Michigan in 2003 and went into the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA, quickly landing him in turn with Copernicus Analytics within months.
Since 2006, he has published research articles with another researcher from the University of Michigan among others from Columbia, Princeton, Tufts, and George Mason Universities, all focused on election data analysis.
NSF and Microsoft
The National Science Foundation and Microsoft began partnering with American universities to provide the Azure research cloud in 2009.
The universities selected were on the cutting edge of developing new tools on the Azure infrastructure — the kinds of mass analytics that Catalist’s scientists were also developing, and while working with the same universities.
As Catalist got up and running in 2007, their client list included all of Copernicus Analytics’ greatest hits and/or were also major beneficiaries of any one or multiple of George Soros’ foundations, including the new Democracy Alliance.
But by 2016, however, the Catalist roster had ballooned into the palpably potent force that has helped to shape narratives, influence the nature of intelligence gathering, and to not just analyze elections, but control them through by any means necessary.
This was all happening just as Catalist began its 2016 election push by highlighting some of their new capabilities including “synthetic data” — data generated by filling in the gaps with artificial intelligence.
In a 2015 FEC lawsuit, Catalist provided a list of all of its past and current clients, a laundry list of world renowned universities.
ACORN
Another of the Democratic Party’s initiatives, ACORN, was under the Democracy Alliance umbrella.
In ACORN’s 2007-2008 Ohio Political Plan, Katy Gall, Mari Engelhardt, and Jeremy Mitchell signed off on a detailed plan to gain access to more voters.
The plan was to analyze polling data about hot button issues and draft ballot measures to have them included on local and state elections, gaining interest from otherwise disillusioned nonvoters.
After the majority of the process is complete, one final revision is made before being sent out with ballots. There is no mention of other voting, only submitting the ballot measures for signatures in order to mobilize voters.
Anne Bartley
After a 2009 meeting at the New York home of George Soros in 2009, Democracy Alliance financier and Rockefeller board member Anne Bartley, and one of her highly esteemed collateral endeavors, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund (NRDC Action Fund), published their 2011 “facebook.”
Among the notables listed within it were Catalist Manager Patricia Bauman and John Podesta. It’s worth the time to look over some of the other notables listed in the publication, arranged in the graphic below.
Soros Onboards with Catalist
Michael Frias
In 2015, Democracy Alliance scored a major win through Catalist when Michael Frias came onto their staff as Chief Client & Marketing Officer.
He led the programs that further connected American intelligence agencies, fueling the gross uneven applications of justice seen commonplace today.
What is interesting is the extensive history in political activism which fed directly into his role in public service, yet facilitating a link between the government and private sector — the perfect man for Catalist, indeed.
One more win yet for Soros was landing his own “mouth” on the Board of Directors in 2015.
Michael Vachon
Vachon may well be the equivalent of putting George or Alexander Soros, themselves into an American political machine. Vachon acts as the Chief of Staff for political contributions, director of communications for all of Mr. Soros’ political dealings.
Michael Vachon is the guy.
Centrally planned, closely coordinated Democratic operatives mobilized the entire technological sector to build what would be a massive voter *manipulation* platform, while George Soros eyed another young star.
Jocelyn Benson
Another of the Party and Democracy Alliance’s early major players was, and remains now, current Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Benson had long since cut her teeth on election reform with the Party, when she spoke at a November, 2006 meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit.
She was a part of George Soros’ 2010 “Secretary of State Project” (SoS), a campaign support initiative to propel the Hungarian-American’s hand-selected picks to the offices who control elections on the state level.
Jennifer Brunner
While Benson was giving her speech to the DSA, Soros’ SoS Project pick in Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, oversaw changes to Ohio’s election laws while serving as Secretary of State which came into play in her own race in 2008.
The changes she spearheaded left holes in election procedure that saw the issuance of mass absentee balloting in place of provisional ballots, that could obtained with only a credit card bill and four numbers, yet was not a consideration until election day.
She sits elected to the Ohio Supreme Court today.
As for Benson, she lost her 2010 bid for Secretary of State, but the loss only fueled her other activism and a drive to reshape election laws nationwide, while “blending the best practices of the East and West.”
More to come on that.
Here it is Gus. I'm am not surprised. I tried to tell the folks I worked for at the OR public utility commission years ago that this was an affront to the states and the cities. FIRSTNet. That is how the Feds were able to change the votes.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/report-nationwide-cellular-network-connects-election-equipment-gives/