Shady outside money is targeting Dallas City Council Races...Trying to install RW
repubs in our non-partisan election trying to make Blue Dallas government Red. They're using tons of lurid mailings (4 of the exact same one just today) and scare robo-calls saying that they are trying to keep the "rioting" out of Dallas and that our council has defunded the police, where nothing could be further from the truth.
A shadowy campaign known only as “Keep Dallas Safe” has been playing politics in Dallas for the past half-year. No one knows who funds the organization, a nonprofit group that can conceal its donors thanks to a rule introduced by the Trump administration in 2020. The people who run the day-to-day operations say their wealthy clients don’t want their names revealed.
The group’s donors may be secret, but its stances are clear: City Manager T.C. Broadnax has to go; Mayor Eric Johnson is OK; and a City Council decision to trim the police department’s overtime budget last year is just one more step on Dallas’ road to anarchy, chaos and “Californication.” (They’re also worried about the city’s “Austinization,” which is presumably similar to Californication, but without the beaches.
...was once implicated in a scheme that involved paying actors to attend public meetings in New Orleans, a practice of faking grass-roots support for a political position, a practice known as astroturfing.
This Trump-era rule where the non-profits don't have to disclose who their donors are has to be stopped ASAP.
As a 501c4 nonprofit, Keep Dallas Safe may conceal its donors while engaging in political campaigns to a certain extent, provided such activities are not the organization's primary activity.
But it would seem to me that that this KDS outfit doesn't do anything that doesn't involve politics. They need to be turned into the FEC or some place to investigate them.
Interesting entire article at:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/anonymous-political-group-keep-dallas-safe-managed-by-former-astroturf-operator-11983637
Also:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/council-member-paula-blackmon-targeted-by-keep-dallas-safe-in-flyer-12009691
(Crime rate in District 9 was actually down.)