Minnesota governor and, let's be honest, 2028 presidential candidate Tim Walz raised some untrimmed eyebrows last month by suggesting that the Democrats needed a "shadow government" to, er, inform the public:
“We see one of the first things they do is try and restrict the vote,” Walz said of the Trump administration. “This is one of the things, though, that this is going to take power industry to — I don’t know what the answer is on this, but I’m kind of — I’ve been saying this: I think we need a shadow government, so when all these things come up every single day, we’ve got an alternate press conference telling the truth about what things are happening, tell them what’s going on.”
Conservatives - myself among them - mocked Walz.
But he sort of tipped the hand on the Democrat playbook.
A few weeks ago - in one of my debut posts on Hot Air - I urged people not to sell = Walz's presidential ambitions too short, if only because he brought with him to the national stage Ken Martin, former chair of the Minnesota DFL, and now chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Martin built and tapped into an exceptionally efficient network of non-profits, PACs, fundraising (don't call them "money-laundering, please) operations, unions and special interest groups that have spent most of the last 20 years dominating statewide politics in Minnesota. Minnesota Democrats are able to tap into the network of money, influence and labor that successful campaigns need to run on.
And in elevating to the national stage, Martin now has access to a network of similar groups nationwide.
And it's something conservatives have a really hard time pulling off.
"Data Republican" is a frequently excellent commentator, and a couple of her recent tweets hit on what I'm getting at, here:
Over the last few months, we've come to a realization that should have landed much harder: NGOs weren't just adjacent to government, they were the parallel government. We were shocked. I was too. But looking back, it's exactly what you'd expect. NGOs operate outside the chain of… https://t.co/xNu8jZKDzt
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) April 13, 2025
NGOs at various levels serve as sort of a parallel government. And it's a level of organization Republicans can't even pretend to have achieved.
Go ahead and open both tweets up - they're long-ish, but worth a read - especially this one:
I've been thinking on the below post, about the NGO problem.
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) April 14, 2025
The Left is structured as a network of NGOs: ruthlessly efficient and ready to act the moment power changes hands.
The Right has no equivalent infrastructure. If I sit down and ask myself, "How would I start an NGO to… https://t.co/v8e9VDbjC6
The money quote:
The Left is structured as a network of NGOs: ruthlessly efficient and ready to act the moment power changes hands.
The Right has no equivalent infrastructure. If I sit down and ask myself, "How would I start an NGO to implement a conservative agenda in D.C.?" ... I draw a blank. Because the dominant instinct on the Right isn't to build, it's to dismantle. Most conservative goals center on shrinking or limiting the federal government.
That creates a fundamental asymmetry. NGOs on the Left are designed to expand state power through policy scaffolding, and once federal funding flows in, it's nearly impossible to tear down. It would take an act of Congress to defund these mechanisms, and Congress rarely votes to shrink its own power.
So, we can't fight fire with fire.
The Democrats don't need to "create a shadow government", as Walz put it. It's there.
And it's bringing home the proverbial bacon for them. Glenn "Instaundit Reynolds" writes in the NYPost about the extent of their influence; Biden's immigration policy is one example:
For example, America’s border crisis was funded in large part by President Joe Biden’s government, which sent large sums of money in the form of grants to various NGOs that helped train migrants on how to get to the United States — and how to claim asylum when they arrived.
NGOs helped the illegal immigrants with expenses on their way, and then provided legal resources and more than $22 billion worth of assistance for them — including cash for cars, home loans and business start-ups — once they got in.
This was US taxpayer money, laundered through “independent” organizations that served to promote goals contrary to US law, but consistent with the policy preferences of the Biden administration.
And the GOP needs to figure out what to do about it.
