The danger is acute for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and it will extend far beyond 2024. As the former South Carolina governor welcomes support wherever she can find it while seeking to be anointed as the one choice anti-Donald Trump forces can coalesce around in the primary process, Haley’s campaign faces the disastrous perception of being just another progressive establishment ruse, at least in the eyes of the grassroots GOP voters who will decide her fate.
Base Republicans strongly believe Americans have been subjected to one con after another from out-of-touch elites in recent years. With that in mind, one can’t imagine a worse look for a GOP candidate than accepting a quarter-million-dollar donation from a billionaire leftist who has specialized in funding nuisance campaigns and false-flag operations.
‘Fighting the Threat of Trumpism’
Donald Trump (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
LinkedIn founder and major Democrat donor Reid Hoffman has given $250,000 to a SuperPAC backing Haley. “While we are fighting to defend the idea of America from the threat of Trumpism, we need to engage with people with whom we disagree about many areas of policy and culture. Nikki Haley would not be as good for America as Joe Biden, but America would survive her administration,” Hoffman wrote in a Dec. 6 LinkedIn post.
“I have invested in the Stand for America PAC supporting Nikki Haley because I agree with Jamie Dimon’s recent comments that Democrats should support Haley in the primary and Biden in the general election,” Hoffman added.
Dimon is CEO of multinational financial services powerhouse JPMorgan Chase. “If you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you to help Nikki Haley, too. Give them a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump,” he declared at The New York Times’ 2023 DealBook Summit on Nov. 29.
A global financier openly imploring wealthy progressives to back Haley, and saying it on a soapbox provided by The New York Times. It should go without saying that this is the last kind of endorsement any serious conservative candidate for office should embrace. Yet despite these words, Haley is boasting of her newfound Wall Street support.
“He’s mad because those Wall Street donors used to support him, and now they support me,” Haley said of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Dec. 6, at the fourth GOP primary debate in Alabama.
“Polling aside, Haley’s most significant issue at present is not poll blindness but tone-deafness when it comes to what the party faithful want,” Liberty Nation’s Mark Angelides noted.
Haley’s embrace of an endorsement by the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity organization underscores the point in bold colors. As the national security crisis on the porous southern border deepens, the cheap-labor-loving Koch faction has resorted to funding pro-migration organizations and progressive political measures to preserve the calamitous status quo.
But it is the Reid Hoffman money that should prove most radioactive to Haley. Hoffman has long been politically active, and he has a penchant for lavishing dollars on ventures critics describe as sleazy.
Democrats for Nikki Haley
Reid Hoffman (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED)
Hoffman bankrolled Trump rape accuser E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against the former president, but Americans weren’t supposed to know that. “[I]t has come to light that Reid Hoffman… has been funding the lawsuit despite Carroll’s previous assertion that no one else was paying for the legal action,” Liberty Nation related in April.
Hoffman’s election shenanigans are even more distasteful.
“Democratic operatives funded by left-wing tech billionaire Reid Hoffman ran a widespread campaign using misleading Facebook pages in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections,” The Daily Caller reported in 2019. “American Engagement Technologies, which was founded by former Obama administration official Mikey Dickerson, bought ads for two Facebook pages, The Daily Real and Today’s Nation, encouraging Republican voters to stay home in the midterm elections, Facebook’s ad archives show,” the news site wrote.
“Both pages appear to be designed to give the impression that they were operated by frustrated conservatives rather than by Democratic operatives…. The misleading ads collectively garnered millions of impressions on Facebook, [a] review of Facebook’s archives found.”
What he did in Alabama in 2017 was even more egregious. “As Russia’s [alleged] online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race,” The New York Times reported in 2018.
“An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it ‘experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections,’” the paper detailed. We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Republican Roy S.] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report read.
Reid Hoffman was the principal financial backer of this caper, to the tune of $100,000. Democrat Doug Jones went on to narrowly defeat Moore by a 50-48% count in a contest that garnered national attention.
Haley, on Dec. 8, told a town hall gathering in Iowa that the GOP primary will soon be whittled down to only her and Trump.
“I think you’ve got three major people that are going to go into Iowa, and I think after Iowa, one [DeSantis] is going to drop,” Haley said, The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports. “And then I think you’re going to have a play with me and Trump in New Hampshire, and then we’re going to go to my home state of South Carolina, and we’re going to take it.”
Haley is all-in on this scenario. But has she contemplated the price she will have to pay to make it happen?
Democrat billionaire Reid Hoffman believes he can game the American electoral process. There’s a term for a Republican candidate who accepts being a tool of such an effort: John Kasich. His is the future Nikki Haley may very well be setting herself up for as she attempts to lock up an artificial and unpopular positioning as the only available option to the most popular figure by far within the Republican Party grassroots.
