In Case You Were Wondering Where All the Money That Could Be Going to Build a Liberal Media Infrastructure Is Actually Going

Behold, a Tip Jar!

I'm putting the Tip Jar at the top of this post instead of discretely at the bottom.

In a minute you'll understand why.

From The New York Times:

Concerned by Trump, Some Republicans Quietly Align With Democrats

...In the past year, however, influential liberal donors and operatives have gone from cheering these so-called Never Trump Republicans to quietly working with — and even funding — them. Through invitation-only emails and private, off-the-record meetings, they have formed a loose network of cross-partisan alliances...

In other words, the Repiublican rough beast we Liberals have been warning them about for decades has finally slouched all the way to White House to be born.

That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, they have gone all in on the Both Siderist lie and have all the money in the world to play with (with emphasis added):

...[Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein]added that there was a “sense of urgency and intellectual vitality animating these efforts” that could “challenge conventional political wisdoms, 20th century political alliances and the two major, internally fractious, parties.”

See, it has finally sunk in to Prince Prospero's revelers that the Red Death has breached their walled-city and that Donald J. Trump and his Republican party really are an existential threat to democracy.  But they are equally freaked out at the implications of admitting the terrifying truth that -- holy shit! the Left really has been right about the Right all along.  Because they they might get icky Libtard juice all over the bed ruffles and the good china.  And so...

The network — composed of overlapping groups led by Democrats such as the donor Rachel Pritzker and several veteran Obama administration operatives, as well as leading Never Trump Republicans like Evan McMullin, Mindy Finn and William Kristol — aims to chart a middle path between a Republican base falling in line behind Mr. Trump and a liberal resistance trying to pull the Democratic Party left.

Oh horrors!  The peasants might get affordable health care and a college education that won't sell their kids into debt bondage!

And the rest you already know, because the script and the players never changes:

The discussions at Patriots and Pragmatists meetings are intended to focus on big picture topics related to democracy, rather than elections or political funding...The group has held three two-day gatherings outside San Francisco, New York and Washington, to which Ms. Pritzker and her political adviser invited 20 to 40 people per meeting. Gatherings have drawn influential Democratic operatives like Mr. Bassin and the Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein. They have also attracted big-name Republican and conservative thinkers, writers and operatives including Mr. Taylor, the legal analyst Benjamin Wittes and the foreign policy hawks Mona Charen, David Frum, Robert Kagan, Mr. Kristol and Jennifer Rubin.

And the amount of money these people can raise never changes.

Perhaps most significantly, Patriots and Pragmatists gatherings have drawn major donors like William D. Budinger, a former Democracy Alliance board member, and representatives of deep-pocketed grant-writing foundations like Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund and Democracy Fund Voice, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative.

For the last few years, those foundations have been donating millions of dollars a year to bipartisan and nonpartisan groups advocating political reforms. But they redoubled their efforts after the 2016 election.

Stand Up Republic and Stand Up Ideas — founded by Mr. McMullin and Ms. Finn — have received a total of as much as $1.3 million from the Democracy Fund groups and the Madison Initiative. And Protect Democracy and the Protect Democracy Project — founded by Mr. Bassin — have received as much as $500,000 from those grant-writing foundations, according to financial information on their websites.

Here is a paragraph taken at random:

The Niskanen Center hosts a semimonthly invitation-only gathering of Trump critics called Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky and the Russian Provisional Government the Meeting of the Concerned, which attendees are asked to keep confidential. While it is attended primarily by a rotating cast of Never Trump Republicans — including the pundit Mr. Kristol and the former Representative Mickey Edwards — meetings sometimes include a Democrat or two presenting research or analysis on relevant issues.

And another:

Other Republicans have been wary to get involved, Mr. Bassin said. “There is a troubling dynamic happening where anytime a conservative expresses concerns, they get branded a Never Trumper and are excommunicated from the American right.”

And I'm done