PEWGATEFoundation Expert Hails Bloggers for Exposing McCain-Feingold Scandal

Pewgate — the scandal which received its name right here at Moonbat Central — is the focus of an important article in the May 12 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy (hat tip, Winfield Myers).

Headlined "In a World of Bloggers, Foundations Can Expect More Scrutiny," the article states that bloggers now perform a function that mainstream media long neglected — monitoring the rivers of cash that major foundations channel each year into radical leftwing causes. The explosion of Pewgate stories across the blogosphere marks an historic turning of the tide, says author William A. Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Schambra writes:

"The news media's treatment of foundation involvement in public policy may have changed forever on March 17. That was the day the New York Post published `Buying 'Reform': Media Missed Millionaires' Scam,' an account by one of its columnists, Ryan Sager, of the massive spending by several mainstream foundations to secure passage of the 2002 overhaul of campaign-finance laws and to keep the issue alive.

"Mr. Sager told his readers he had discovered `an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a 'mass movement.'"

A group of radical foundations including the Pew Charitable Trusts and George Soros' Open Society Institute collaborated in a ten-year, $140-million conspiracy to deceive the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court into supporting the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act.


Bloggers to the Breach!

BCRA empowers federal judges and Federal Election Comissioners to regulate political speech, deciding who is allowed to say what, on which issues, about which candidates and through which media.

This awesome regulatory power was originally limited to paid political advertising on radio and television. However, subsequent court decisions extended the power of McCain-Feingold, granting the federal government authority to censor the Internet, including the political speech of individual bloggers (see "Pewgate: Battle of the Blogosphere," FrontPage, March 25, 2005). Schambra writes:

"Mr. Sager's exposé ricocheted immediately throughout the burgeoning network of conservative Weblogs, or `blogs.' It climbed quickly through right-leaning newspapers, with articles and editorials in the New York Sun, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and into the prominent conservative journals National Review and the Weekly Standard. By late March, an audience of millions could catch snippets of the Treglia tape on Fox News. The story even achieved conservative `gatehood' status, often referred to as `Pewgate.' … [T]his episode marks the coming of age of an entirely new communications network, which will bring its own special angle to reporting on philanthropy and public policy."

In an April 14 post, we documented the spread of the word "Pewgate" from its origin here at Moonbat Central to the furthest reaches of the conservative blogosphere (see "Pewgate: It Seems We Have Invented a Word"). We are proud to have lent a hand — along with so many of our fellow bloggers — in spreading the word about Ryan Sager's remarkable scoop.

Enough said. Now it's time to get back to work. Political censorship is here. It's the law of the land. And it grows stronger by the day.

Pewgate showed us that McCain-Feingold was pushed through Congress by fraud. It showed us that the Supreme Court justices who upheld McCain-Feingold relied heavily on phony research ginned up by Pewgate-funded institutions such as the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Thank you, Mr. Sager, for breaking this story. And thanks to every blogger who helped disseminate it. Now it is time to act on what we know, and begin the long, hard process of regaining our lost freedom.