Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and former vice presidential contender for the 2024 Democratic ticket hosted a taxpayer funded “get out the vote” seminar for influencers that largely skewed towards his own political party.
The Daily Caller reports:
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used public funds to train dozens of overwhelmingly liberal social media influencers on how they can get their audience to vote in the 2024 election, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a records request.
Shapiro directed the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to pay thousands of dollars to host a day-long “Democracy Summer Camp” on July 25 to instruct people with large social media followings on how to get their audiences to vote and how to identify “misinformation” on the internet, according to the documents. The DCNF obtained a list of 43 influencers the governor’s office invited to attend the publicly-funded training and, upon review, none of the influencers favored Republicans and roughly 70% had an explicitly liberal social media presence.
Despite the seminar’s focus on “misinformation,” Shapiro himself falsely claimed that former President Trump packed the United States Supreme Court during his first term, when all he did was fulfill his constitutionally outlined duties as president and nominate judges to fill vacancies.
One of the larger influencers in attendance also falsely claimed that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 would be implemented by Donald Trump, and that he planned to gut medicare and Social Security, despite his repeated disavowals of the policy proposal he never participated in or co-signed, and not indicating plans to cut either social program this election cycle.
The Daily Caller continues:
Also among attendees of the event were several liberal influencers with massive followings. Philadelphia-based comedian Alex Pearlman, for instance, has roughly 3 million followers across Instagram and TikTok and consistently posts videos attacking Republicans.
At least two influencers that attended Shapiro’s event, Elizabeth Booker Houston and Elizabeth Strong, rode on the Harris campaign’s “reproductive freedom” bus in September. Houston has nearly 600,000 followers across her social media accounts and almost exclusively posts about her support for Democrats and opposition to Republicans.
To Republican commentators and politicians, it demonstrated an extreme lapse in judgment, bordering on illegal.
Pennsylvania State Rep. Seth Grove told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “Having the governor’s office use taxpayer funds to only have Democrat social media influencers … is very, very sketchy and was a waste of taxpayer dollars. That was a cost to the taxpayers to do campaign work. I don’t believe for a second they had any interest in inviting Republicans … it was lopsided and targeted to Democratic influencers.”
Grove continued, “They shouldn’t have done it, they shouldn’t have used taxpayer dollars and I think Governor Shapiro’s campaign should reimburse the citizens of the commonwealth for this event. They know they were in the wrong, they knew they were using taxpayer funds to do an event solely for Democrats.”
Too bad Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro does not recognize that part of the President’s job is filling vacant Federal judicial postions.
He must think it’s hard to get PA donkeys to the polls. Hope he’s right.
Of course,he is just a typical Democrat,they all are petty criminals
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