Those getting all their news from the mainstream media may be forgiven this week for believing that there was a popular uprising underway against President Donald Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy.
‘Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash,’ blared a New York Times headline on Sunday.
‘GOP lawmakers confronted by constituents angry with Trump-Musk cuts,’ reported CBS News last Friday.
NBC News even suggested that the president’s allies may cancel public events altogether after facing down ‘angry’ crowds.
The pitchforks are out!
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force better run for the hills lest they be tarred and feathered!
Well, not so fast.
The truth is that many of these outraged townsfolk are, in reality, partisan Democrats organized by the very left-wing organizations that stand to lose millions in federal funding if DOGE succeeds at its mission to root out government waste.
Those getting all their news from the mainstream media may be forgiven this week for believing that there was a popular uprising underway against President Donald Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Elon Musk (pictured) and his Department of Government Efficiency task force better run for the hills lest they be tarred and feathered!
But the so-called journalists at the New York Times, CBS News and others appeared determined not to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Consider the raging ‘protests’ at a town hall held by Georgia Republican Rich McCormick last Thursday, as he returned to his district for the recent Congressional recess.
Clips of the meeting went viral on social media and DOGE critics held it up as evidence of a widening fallout.
‘McCormick faces furious locals in Town Hall DOGE Mega-Backlash,’ wrote The Daily Beast.
Politico presaged ‘classic early signs of backlash.’
After all, Trump got 60 percent of the vote in McCormick’s solid-red district. If these voters are this enraged, then something must have gone dreadfully wrong.
The problem with that narrative is this ‘protest’ was more astroturf than grassroots.
CBS News spoke to town hall attendee Maggie Goldman, who insisted the outrage was bipartisan. ‘I think there were conservatives there,’ Goldman said. ‘I think there were Republicans.’
What CBS didn’t mention, as a Washington Free Beacon investigation has now shown, is that Goldman is a former organizer for Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Democratic presidential campaign who donated to the Harris 2024 ticket and has run for office in McCormick’s district as a Democrat.
Hardly an objective observer, I’d say.
Moreover, Georgia-based radio host Erick Erickson noted that the McCormick event was held near the border with a neighboring district that is heavily Democratic, not far from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a big government agency in Musk’s sights.
‘Many of the people who were at the town hall were not actually voters within the Seventh Congressional District, according to the Congressman’s staff and numerous others who attended the event that I have spoken to,’ Erickson reported.
It was a similar story elsewhere across the country. And the media malpractice alone is cause for concern. But there is something even more chilling going on here.
Some of the major groups organizing these supposedly grassroots demonstrations are far-left organizations whose lifeblood is a steady stream of taxpayer dollars funneled to them by the federal agencies that Trump and Musk are currently auditing.
The group Indivisible, that describes itself as a ‘grassroots movement… with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda,’ published a ‘Musk or Us Recess Toolkit’ instructing protesters to confront Republicans over their ‘complicity in the Trump-Musk coup’.
MoveOn.org touted its effort to mobilize nationwide opposition in an Associated Press article earlier this month announcing their ‘Congress Works for Us, Not Musk’ campaign.
Both of these groups have received millions of dollars from The Soros Open Society Foundation, which was founded by billionaire George Soros.
And it just so happens that an Open Society Foundation partner organization, the East-West Management Institute, is under scrutiny for taking in $31.2 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development just last year, and over $270 million over the past 15 years.
That’s just one of the Soros-linked non-governmental organizations whose federal funding is now under investigation.
Some of the major groups organizing these supposedly grassroots demonstrations are far-left organizations whose lifeblood is a steady stream of taxpayer dollars funneled to them by the federal agencies that Trump and Musk are currently auditing. (Pictured: Anti-Musk protesters).
These groups have received millions of dollars from The Soros Open Society Foundation, which was founded by billionaire George Soros.
Of course, the left-wing press could tell you all this – if they cared to.
Instead, they are running the same old script that failed them in the 2024 election. Then, they told us that Joe Biden was fine, Kamala Harris was running on ‘joy’ and voters were up in arms about ‘Project 2025.’
They have learned nothing.
DOGE isn’t anywhere near as politically radioactive as its conflicted-critics would have us believe – at least, not so far.
Currently, opinion polling shows wide majorities think that federal government waste is rampant and that it’s good to know where taxpayer money is going.
But while Trump, for his part, is still more popular than he ever was in his first term, surveys show that Americans are leery of Musk.
A public backlash against the Muskian slash and burn approach to the federal bureaucracy is possible – and it may start as small brush fires in the Congressional district.
Indeed, Republicans shouldn’t get too complacent.
Just because today’s protests are ginned up by paid activists, it doesn’t mean that there will be no real voter anger tomorrow.
For now, however, the connections between the activist NGOs and government agencies on the chopping block are just more proof that DOGE is barking up the right trees.
