How the Murder of Mollie Tibbetts Shined a Light On the GOP’s Dark Money Propaganda Machine

What does the mur­der of Mol­lie Tib­betts have in com­mon with down­fall of Amer­i­ca? If you had asked Fox News or Pres­i­dent Trump in the days fol­low­ing the rev­e­la­tion that Mol­lie’s mur­der­er was ‘an ille­gal’, they would have told you ille­gal immi­gra­tion is what the mur­der and Amer­i­ca’s down­fall have in com­mon. But as we’re going to see, the real com­mon link between Mol­lie’s mur­der and the down­fall of Amer­i­ca was dis­cov­ered and the right-wing noise sud­den­ly stopped talk­ing about Mol­lie’s mur­der almost entire­ly. Because that com­mon link turned out to be Nicole Schlinger, an influ­en­tial GOP fundrais­er and an impor­tant fig­ure in one of the most impor­tant GOP 501(c)(4) (‘social wel­far’) polit­i­cal super­PACs: Amer­i­can Future Fund (AFF). And as we’re going to see, the sto­ry of AFF is the sto­ry of how the explo­sion of dark mon­ey in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics was exe­cut­ed. And as sto­ry of how it was pri­ma­ry right-wing mega-donors behind this explo­sion. It’s a sto­ry illus­tra­tive of how the kinds of pro­pa­gan­da net­works that would exploit the mur­der of an Iowan col­lege stu­dent for polit­i­cal gain oper­ate and the dom­i­nance of these net­works in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, so it real­ly is a sto­ry about the down­fall of Amer­i­ca.