The Right-Wing Funder Behind Harvard Billboards Targeting Pro-Palestine Students

A prominent conservative donor is behind the controversial Harvard Square billboard that doxxed students who signed a letter critical of Israel’s role in its war with Palestine.

The billboard truck, which appeared on campus on Wednesday and emblazoned the names and faces of students under the banner “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites,” was organized by the conservative watchdog Accuracy in Media. However, the money fueling the initiative ran much deeper, reported The Guardian.

The nonprofit’s single largest donor in 2022 was the Informing America Foundation, according to IRS filings obtained by the outlet. That year, Informing America signed a check to the watchdog for more than $166,000, roughly 18 percent of the donations received by the nonprofit that year.

Elsewhere, Informing America doled out more than $8 million to 12 different media and activist groups that same year. Causes under their umbrella included Star News Digital Media, a for-profit news network founded by former Tea Party activists whose sites have been likened to “pink slime” and dubbed “Baby Breitbarts.”

The group has also contributed to Real Clear Foundation, a news nonprofit whose aggregated news and original reporting headlines “anti-MAGA” initiatives, highlights random violence in liberal cities, and levels its criticisms at Joe Biden and his family.

Behind Informing America, however, is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a $1.5 billion institution that played a significant part in funding a network of voter suppression groups following the 2020 election, according to a report by the Center for Media and Democracy.

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation’s founder, executive chairman, and namesake , Diana Davis Spencer, was not only identified as Informing America Foundation’s single largest donor, providing $1.5 million in 2021, but also a board member of the conservative group.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton called for the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians on Sunday, during an interview with Shannon Bream on Fox News.

“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas—Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend,” Cotton said. 

Over the past week, Israel has killed at least 2,800 people and injured nearly 10,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, in an onslaught of retaliatory strikes after the terrorist group Hamas made a deadly incursion into Israeli territory, killing 1,400 Israelis.  

Cotton did not bother to make a distinction between Hamas, the terrorist organization, and the millions of Palestinian civilians who are now facing a humanitarian crisis as Israel denies them food, water, and electricity. Instead, Cotton insisted that Hamas was to blame for the thousands of Palestinians suffering as a result of Israeli bombs. 

Cotton explicitly blamed Hamas for the Israeli military’s slaughter of Palestinian children, implying that the terrorist group was trying to force the hand of the United States by causing Israel to commit heinous war crimes. “If Hamas uses schools, and kindergartens, and mosques for military purposes, Israel has every right under the laws of war to strike back,” Cotton said. “It is Hamas that is committing war crimes by using those civilians to create the imagery to try to put pressure on the Biden administration,” he added.

While Democratic support for Palestinians has increased in the face of Israeli aggression, the Biden administration has not signaled much more than sympathy for the Palestinians, and continued to vocally back Israel. 

Cotton’s abhorrent call for violence ignores the fact that the Israeli military has previously engaged in disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, in blatant violation of international law. Most crucially, international law obligations are nonreciprocal, meaning that if one side commits war crimes, that doesn’t mean the other can, according to Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. 

More than anything, Cotton’s calls for indiscriminate violence do nothing to wind down a conflict that has already cost thousands of innocent lives and that threatens to expand into a devastating regional war. 

Trucks transporting badly needed humanitarian aid to Gaza are stuck outside Israel’s border with Egypt, ahead of a planned ground offensive that has strangled the region’s access to fuel, medicine, food, and water.

The Rafah crossing, Gaza’s “lifeline” for international aid, has been closed for more than a week after Israel bombed the checkpoint, rendering the passageway inoperable, reported Reuters; Israel has continued to bomb the area.

Egypt has “been seeking to keep the crossing operational and in a way that allows the entry of humanitarian aid,” the country’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told ABC News on Monday.

“Until now, unfortunately, the Israeli government has not taken a position to allow the opening of the crossing from the Gaza side for the entry of aid or the exit of nationals of [other] countries,” he added.

More than 400,000 Palestinians in cities across the region’s south took shelter in hospitals and schools on Monday, reported the Associated Press. Israel has called on more than a million people to evacuate the enclave’s northern region for the south as Israel enters a new phase of its all-out assault on Hamas.

While Israeli airstrikes pounded the southern city of Khan Younis, Israel’s government denied reports that it had agreed to a ceasefire to permit the transport of humanitarian aid and safe passage of Palestinian refugees and foreign nationals to Egypt. “At the moment there is no ceasefire for humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip and the exit of foreigners,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Israel has distributed orders to evacuate residents along its northern border with Lebanon, preparing for an exchange of fire with Hezbollah after the militant group announced it targeted five positions in northern Israel.

At least 2,800 people have been killed in Palestine, with 10,850 wounded, according to a statement from the Gaza Government Press Office obtained by The New York Times, which noted that more than 60 percent of those killed were women and children.

The situation in Gaza’s hospitals is particularly dire, with an Israeli ground invasion on the horizon. “It’s absolutely impossible to evacuate the hospital,” Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima, the director of Gaza City’s largest medical complex told The New York Times. “There is nowhere in Gaza that can accept the number of patients in our intensive care unit or neonatal intensive care unit or even the operating rooms.”

On the other side of the conflict, more than 1,400 Israelis have died, the majority of whom were civilians killed during Hamas’s three-pronged surprise attack against Israel on October 7.

Israeli authorities reported on Monday that 199 hostages had been retrieved from Gaza and that the head of Hamas’s general intelligence had been assassinated during air raids in Khan Younis.

Indiscriminate lies, criminal charges, and intraparty calls to resign can’t seem to topple Representative George Santos—but bankruptcy might.

Numerous donors to the political pariah’s campaign wanted their money back amid the Long Island Republican’s numerous scandals over the summer. New filings with the Federal Election Commission show a significant overdraft between July and September: negative $16,526.09. That consists of $17,200 in refunds, along with $674 in new donations.

Santos’s campaign has spent lavishly even though it has brought in almost no new donations. In those same months, the New York Republican’s campaign spent $42,000, leaving him with less than $23,000 in the bank by the end of September. The bulk of that spending went to the D.C.-based legal firm Dickinson Wright, which Santos owes another $70,000, reported Axios.

On top of that, Santos’s campaign treasurer seemingly “became aware” of more than $120,000 in previously undisclosed debts within the last three months owed to several aides and vendors, according to the filings.

Added to the $630,000 that Santos still owes himself thanks to a fake (and then suddenly real) 2022 campaign contribution, that leaves the congressmen more than $800,000 in the red.

On Tuesday, Santos was hit with a dozen charges related to stealing his donors’ identification and credit card information, allegedly wiring tens of thousands of dollars to his personal bank account while using the rest to jack up his campaign numbers.

“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign. Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” said United States Attorney Breon Peace in a release announcing the indictment.

The congressman is due in federal court in Suffolk County on October 27.

The Gaza Strip is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe that is unprecedented since 1967. At least 2,300 lost their lives. This is the number who have arrived at the hospitals. There are hundreds of people who were buried under the rubble, and no one could reach them.

The unprecedented destruction of infrastructure has made life a living hell open to everyone. It is the harshest on women, children, and the disabled. There are 8,000 wounded in hospitals within the first week. This is close to the number of wounded in the 51-day war in 2014. This would exceed the capacity of the most advanced health systems in the world, let alone a fragile health system that has been suffering for years from a shortage of medicines and equipment. Medical teams are no longer able to work.

The Israeli army order for 1.1 million residents of the Gaza Strip to evacuate their homes and flee to the southern regions, while at the same time bombing the cars carrying them, contradicts humanity. The decision to impose a complete siege on Gaza, cut off electricity, stop fuel, and prevent the delivery of infant formula and medicines threatens to turn the whole Gaza Strip into a real grave.

It is impossible for two million people to live in less than a third of Gaza’s area. Not allowing humanitarian aid or a humanitarian truce that allows people to catch their breath represents in itself unbearable suffering for the population. Anyone who does not die in the raids will die of hunger and thirst.

What is required is a 48-hour humanitarian truce now, before Sunday, in which people can get their needs. The most important thing is a ceasefire to prevent further loss of life and prevent more suffering of the hell that opened its doors wide in the past seven days.