Rebekah Mercer. She looks nice.
There is much talk about Parler in the last few days because that’s where Trump tried to land his sinking social media ship after Twitter and Facebook (and its Instragram) put a few holes below its water line by blocking him for, well, trying to overturn the US government. As it turns out, Parler was co-founded and bankrolled by the very wealthy Rebekah Mercer. She’s the daughter of Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who backed Trump among many other right wing nutjobs, started the conservative Heritage Foundation, invested in Breitbart, and also was behind Cambridge Analytica, the political data company now defunct. If CA sounds familiar, that was the outfit that was involved in fucking with the 2016 election in part by using Facebook data to micro-market voters.
So who is Rebekah. CNN provides a nice feature article on her, Parler and the Mercers, including this:
The media-shy Rebekah Mercer is widely reported to have persuaded then-candidate Trump to reshuffle his campaign organization and hire Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to help run his presidential bid in the final stretch of the 2016 election. Rebekah Mercer went on to serve on the executive committee of Trump's transition team,
There have been other bios of Rebekah. For example from Politico:
With Donald Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party, Rebekah Mercer has supplanted the Koch brothers as the right’s most important megadonor—expanding the scope of what constitutes political spending along the way. While the Kochs pioneered the creation of sprawling private empires made possible in the post-Citizens United era, Mercer has achieved something like full vertical integration of her own private political ecosystem. It’s all in service of her anti-establishment views—and, often, President Trump’s political fortunes.
And this describes her anti-climate.science agenda:
More than two-dozen American Museum of Natural History curators called for the removal Republican megadonor Rebekah Mercer from the museum’s board in 2018, citing her habit of giving to organizations that deny the reality of climate change. Now, it would seem, those demands have finally been met …
(snip)
The Mercer Family Foundation, which Rebekah Mercer chairs, … has donated tens of millions of dollars to climate change-denial organizations such as the Heartland Institute.
Nice. Too bad Amazon threw a depth charge into Trump’s ship by kicking Parler off its hosting service. No doubt Rebekah will find a way to help salvage his ghost ship.
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