How The Democratic Party Became One Giant "Learing Center"

A Massive Money Laundering Scheme Operating Behind a False Front

When intrepid young journalist Nick Shirley made his way to Minneapolis’s now notorious “Quality Learing Center,” he found not just a local scam, but also a too perfect metaphor for today’s Democratic Party. Operating behind the false front of a legitimate political party, Democrats have fashioned nothing more than a money laundering operation that exploits the anxieties of its base to empower and enrich its friends and allies.

Although the seeds were planted long ago, those seeds have borne their dark fruit thanks to at least three helpful federal interventions and a major shift in newsroom zeitgeist. Exploiting migrants, it should be noted, has always been at the heart of the growth strategy. Democrats have held a near monopoly on urban vote fraud since at least the mid-nineteenth century when Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall mastered the art of picking winners.

The face of the Democratic Party has hardly changed from the days of Boss Tweed

Tweed’s power lay in his ability to control the Irish vote. “As long as I count the votes,” Tweed was caricatured as saying, “what are you going to do about it?” The New York Times of that era did not sit by idly. It was the Times reporting that led to Tweed’s downfall. Unchastened, Tweed’s successors in New York and other cities would stake out claims to ethnic groups newly arrived from Europe, from Puerto Rico, from Mexico, and especially from the American South.

For years, these urban machines were provincial affairs that drew their funds from local sources The New Deal changed all that. “The federal government has opened up its money bags and poured more than a million dollars into Kansas City and Jackson County,” The Kansas City Star reported in 1933, and virtually all of that money flowed through the machine managed by “Boss” Tom Pendergast.

Now playing for higher stakes, Pendergast vote harvesters upped their game. On a March 1934 Election Day—”Bloody Tuesday”—thugs roamed Kansas City beating and intimidating voters to ensure victory for their chosen candidates. Before the day was over, four people were killed and 11 injured.

When not killing their wayward voters, machine hacks in KC and elsewhere used the new federal money to woo the black vote, a vote that had been trending two-to-one Republican as late as 1928. The new dependence on the federal government had the intended side effect of pushing both blacks and whites to the left.

In time, as in 19th century New York, the local press in Kansas City rallied to expose a corrupt urban machine. Fighting corruption was then the mission of most major newspapers. As late as 1977, for instance, the Chicago Sun-Times partnered with a local watchdog group to run an elaborate sting on Chicago’s Democratic machine. Those days, alas, were coming to an end.

In May 1964, aspiring to outshine Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson previewed his master plan. “I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges,” said Johnson in a speech whose grandiosity would have made even FDR squirm. “From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Among the more disruptive of Great Society programs was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The OEO insisted on “maximum feasible participation” by local community groups in spending the millions pouring almost randomly into the cities. The seemingly mindless distribution of government grants alarmed party bosses everywhere. “What in the hell are you doing?” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley asked the OEO head. “Does the president know he’s putting M-O-N-E-Y in the hands of subversives?”

Whether or not Johnson knew what he was doing, the die had been cast. By directly subsidizing what came to be known as NGOs, Johnson initiated the age of identity politics and alienated much of the party’s white working class base. A media that had been keen on exposing vote fraud into the 1960s and 1970s tread much more lightly when the operatives were black, Puerto Rican, or other entitled ethnics.

The composition of America’s newsrooms was changing as well. Media outlets had begun to recruit almost exclusively from the nation’s J-Schools which were at least as liberal as the universities that housed them. In their quest for inclusivity, these outlets zeroed in on minorities and women who were expected to put the interests of their particular group over any tradition of objective journalism. As a result of these trends, the media all but abandoned reporting on voter fraud.

The events of 2020 solidified the Democratic Party as a full blown “Learing Center.” An extraordinary article published by Time magazine in February 2021 laid out the master plan. The author, Molly Ball, detailed what the article’s headlined described as “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The word “saved” is misleading. “Rigged” would be more accurate.

Time Magazine Image from Ball’s “Secret History”

One “conspiracy theory” traced to the Right is that the George Floyd riots were orchestrated to enhance Democratic chances in November. Ball confirmed that the conspiracy was no mere theory. The organizers who led what she called “the racial-justice uprising” hoped to “harness its momentum for the election.” Rioting, Ball all but boasted, was the leverage leftists used to keep the business interests in line.

In the run-up to the election, the major media not only refused to investigate the rigging in progress, but they also conspired to suppress those who tried. Then still with Project Veritas, James O’Keefe did an excellent job of showing how the many gears of this well-funded cabal meshed. In late September 2020, Project Veritas went public with its research into industrial strength “granny farming” in Minneapolis’s large Somali community.

Aiding the Project Veritas team were a few undercover journalists from within that community. They were alarmed by the Democrats’ exploitation of their countrymen and their countrymen’s eagerness to be corrupted. Conspiring with their friends in academia, the media dismissed incontrovertible evidence of massive Somali vote fraud and buried the scam under headlines such as USA Today’s, “Fact check: No proof of alleged voter fraud scheme or connection to Rep. Ilhan Omar.”

Like their friends at the Quality Learing Center, Democrats grew reckless in their abuse of the system. In 2020, when the decrepit hack they ran for president got 16 million more votes than Hillary Clinton had in 2016, they flashed their Boss Tweed smiles and punished anyone who questioned the vote count, even to the point of jail time.

Having succeeded in stealing an election, the increasingly cocky Democrats ginned up hysteria around COVID and used the resulting mania to justify sending billions—trillions?—to their favorite unions, minority groups, fake causes, and NGOs. They especially favored those NGOs that complemented the cartels’ work in sneaking millions of future voters across the border and distributing them around the country. Someone had to replace the white voters the party had alienated.

Party leaders helped themselves as well. Barack and Michelle have amassed a combined estimated net worth of approximately $70 million, Bill and Hillary Clinton $120 million, Nancy and Paul Pelosi upwards of $275 million.

In 2024, their house of cards came tumbling down. Joe Biden’s spectacular failure in his June debate and Kamala Harris’s equally inept campaign revealed the Potemkin nature of the whole enterprise. Democrats could deliver no more of what they promised than could the hucksters at the Quality Learing Center.

The signs at the third “No Kings” rally revealed a party in disarray, a collective of often competing interests united only by an obsessive hatred of President Trump. Hate, to sure, is a powerful motivator. It might get the Democrats through the midterms. If it doesn’t, the party may have to find new signage—and new funding—for its many empty storefronts.