Disinformation Group Behind Attacks on Carolyn Carluccio in PA Supreme Court Race
Courier Newsroom is the spawn of the Left’s professional activist army. Will voters fall for its latest deception?
“Dark money” activists are at it again in Pennsylvania.
Just weeks before voters determine who will occupy the state’s recently vacated supreme court seat, a partisan group launched an ad claiming Republican candidate Carloyn Carluccio opposes all restrictions on abortion. In official statements, Carluccio doesn’t take a stance on abortion since the issue may one day come before the court.
That ad was funded by Pennsylvanians for Judicial Fairness, a committee headed by Democratic lawyer Adam Bonin, who advised the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and numerous leftist groups. The committee also banks with Amalgamated, the SEIU-owned bank used by virtually every Democratic group in the country.
But the real story is the source of the ad itself, which relies on reporting from the Keystone, whichmarkets itself as an “independent” news site. In fact it’s run by Courier Newsroom, a “dark money” group which commands a network of partisan propaganda sites masquerading as trusted local news outlets in 9 states, all of which are key to winning the 2024 presidential race.
Far from playing at neutrality, Courier brags about fighting “right-wing . . . disinformation.” In practice that means banning Republicans like Donald Trump from giving interviews to the press, smearing conservatives as white supremacists, and accusing the New York Times (of all places) of not being “serious” enough about “right-wing extremism.”
Disinformation for Democrats
That’s no surprise considering its origins. Courier was founded by Democratic operative and ex-Obama campaign staffer Tara McGowan, who launched the group in 2017 to defeat Trump and Congressional Republicans.
It’s part of McGowan’s larger operation: ACRONYM, a partisan group that funds Courier and other affiliates to help elect Democrats—at least 63 since 2018—and spent $100 million on a digital ad campaign to defeat Trump in 2020. One of its uglier affiliates is Shadow Inc., a tech company whose digital app was responsible for screwing up the 2018 Iowa Democratic caucuses.
Courier’s first local pop-up was the Virginia Dogwood, which helped Democrats seize control of the Virginia legislature and governor’s mansion for the first time since 1993, spending $275,000 in Facebook ads to turn out Democratic voters.
Courier Newsroom in turn is owned by Good Information Inc., a $65 million group that fights conservative “disinformation” in the news under McGowan’s leadership with funding from partisan billionaires George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and other Democratic mega-donors.
That ought to raise eyebrows, considering that Hoffman bankrolled a $100,000 disinformation Facebook campaign to defeat Republican Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama Senate election, electing a Democrat (Doug Jones) for the first time in two decades. Hoffman funded another disinformation campaign to defeat Republicans in the 2018 midterms.
In both cases, fake bot accounts—tailored to look like they were run by frustrated conservatives, not leftists—urged Republican voters to stay home or even vote for Democrats to punish candidates for betraying “real conservatives.” It worked.
But this how the Left’s professional activist army works—spreading lies to deceive truth-seeking Americans for partisan ends. What they don’t want you to see is the multi-billion-dollar political machine operating in the shadows to elect Democrats—and hoping no one notices.
There’s a way to stop this machine from fooling Pennsylvania: Ignore it and vote for Carolyn Carluccio in November.
