Pathetic: David Brock launches low-budget project to attack incoming congressional Republicans

After years of wasting big-dollar Democrat donations on noisy, useless "fact-checking" of no credibility whatsoever, David Brock has launched himself a new project.

According to American Greatness:

With funding from some of the biggest donors in Democrat politics, Brock's new nonprofit group, "Facts First USA," plans undermine congressional Republicans as soon as they take control the House of Representatives.

The group intends to spend $5 million-a-year to push back against an expected onslaught of investigations into Joe Biden's incompetent and corrupt administration, as well as his notoriously corrupt family's foreign business dealings.

Brock has stepped away from his position as chairman of Media Matters and American Bridge, "to focus on Facts First USA, for which he will serve as president,"  the New York Times reported on Thursday.

This is completely wretched.  The new Congress hasn't even been seated yet, and already Brock and his big-dollar donors are trying to halt congressional investigations into the influence-peddling and corruption that have defined the Biden administration.  Nobody's been sworn in yet, and some of the congressional seats are still being determined in blue states, but Brock is right there to announce his outrage, as if the acts he abhors had already been done, flashing a $5-million budget.

Guess we know what's bothering the Democrats these days.  They don't like democracy when it involves voters opting to shift power, and they really don't want Joe Biden investigated.  Brock has served for years as the Democrats' biggest lickspittle.

What's vivid here, though, is that it almost looks like a tale of decline and fall.

Number one, while this does involve some money, it's not the kind of money Brock has been pulling in in the past.

His Media Matters project, a "fact-checking" outfit intended to harass mainstream journalists who stray from the Democrat talking points, was funded by huge infusions from the Tides Foundation, George Soros, and other loathsome and often secretive operations.  In 2014,  the last year for which such stats are available, Media Matters' revenue rolled in at around $14 million, and they spent $13 million.

This one plans to spend $5 million, meaning it's going to be about half as big as the previous project unless the operation is set to have huge overhead.  More likely, it will operate on the same ratio as Media Matters, given Brock's heavy involvement — spending $5 million likely means he has $5.5 million to work with.

And thus far, it doesn't look like a big-dollar operation.  Based on its chintzy website, which has barely any content and no high-tech bells and whistles, it doesn't look like much more than the $5 mil, which is quite a bit less to be spent than the previous Media Matters empire that Brock for some reason stepped down from.  The New York Times has said the new project is being funded with "dark money," meaning that whoever is donating to this trashy project doesn't want his name on it.

The "content" begins with a plain vanilla website done in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which are the basic building blocks for a website.  As I click open the "inspect" from the Google developer tools, I see some flexbox work, which is a bit more advanced, and some attached JQuery library event listeners, but no advanced programming in SASS, React, Python, or the latest languages the front-end web developers are using these days.  The website works, it's functional, it has no broken code that affects the user, so credit for that.  But the bottom line is that a basic website like this probably did not cost Brock a huge amount of money unless he overpaid for it.

The actual chintziness of the site is in its weak, blathery content, beginning with its transparent banner overlay of the grayed out faces of Republicans in they really hate — Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, a few others.

And their logo?  A nothingburger, zero cleverness, just some rough font work in a block deposited in a circle, how clever.  I wouldn't be surprised if Brock himself designed and created it.  Anyone could.  Once again, low budget. 

Here's what passes for the mission for them.  Read and retch:

Lacking a forward-looking agenda, the new MAGA-Majority in the House of Representatives will spend the next two years aggressively investigating President Biden, members of the Administration, and the President's family. They will do so without regard to facts, without concern for fairness, and without limitation. They seek to grind down the entire executive branch and to engage in political theatre and character assassination that distracts from real issues, creates a false perception of corruption, runs up legal bills, and threatens the livelihoods of those caught in their web of lies.

For a bunch of purported fact-checkers, they have no way of knowing whether Republicans will investigate Joe Biden with regard for facts, concern for fairness, or anything else, because they haven't been seated yet as a Republican-led Congress.

Who has time for this tripe? 

Let's go to their Twitter site.  Take a look at their use of photos — they appear to be using generic free ones, not expensive subscription photos.  Here is their Twitter banner head, which shows a generic photo of the Capitol, a cheesy dreamy generic picture actually that may be free — and notice that they have all of 127 follower, while following 129 people.  They aren't exactly "influencers." 

They're just there to smear, to project, to do all the things that Democrats did to President Trump's appointees before they were even able to take office — e.g., Gen. Michael Flynn. 

So now they're going to try to duplicate that model onto Republicans in this incoming Congress, as if nobody was paying attention the first time.

Sure, they've got the New York Times to write up a gushy and incurious announcement.  They have that.

And they may be a bunch of aces expert in shifting the narrative and smearing Republicans as granny-shovers and Biden-haters, but in light of how little there is there, I kind of doubt it.  They've run this template before.  They've been to the well multiple times.  Their donors are donating less.  Their act is old.

Color me skeptical that they are going to have any effect at all.  The good part is watching that donor money get flushed down the toilet, ensuring it can't be spent on anything that's "productive" for the left.

Let's watch Brock flail like Rumpelstiltskin when it grows ever more obvious that the gig is up.

Image: Twitter screen shot.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com