Ones, but Mostly Zeroes: A Little-Noticed Aspect of the RNC Capture

The Trump family takeover of the RNC has rightfully grabbed headlines, and for multiple reasons. Coming on the heels of Trump's multiple financial judgments, there is justified speculation that the organization's coffers could be plundered for his various legal fees. Another, more alarming reason for the takeover to capture our consciousness is its bellwether nature; in many ways What Donald Trump is doing to the RNC reminds us of what he plans to do to the United States government were he ever to be elected again. But there is another aspect to the authoritarian seizure of this Republican Party organ that isn't receiving much attention, and could potentially turn out to be just as consequential.

On February 29, Roger Sollenberger published an investigative piece in the Daily Beast that, based on a skim of the headline and lede, ostensibly appears to be centered on Kari Lake and her connection to an app developer with ties to Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA. And without a doubt, it is quite a story. On the heels of Lake's releasing a recording of Jeff Dewit appearing to offer her a financial quid, for the quo of sitting out the Senate race, it turns out Lake's entanglement with Dewit ran through a well-funded tech company that doesn't seem to have much financial documentation.

At the time the recording was made, Lake still had a financial connection to that ousted GOP chair, Jeff DeWit—via a campaign tech startup closely tied to a top MAGA-world nonprofit, a company whose most notable characteristic is a glaring absence of a political paper trail.

In fact, that startup—called “Superfeed Technologies, Inc.”—had its authority to do business revoked by the state of Arizona while it employed both DeWit, its former CEO, and Lake, who reported receiving more than $100,000 from the entity in the personal financial disclosure she filed last month.

The revocation overlapped not just with Lake’s employment, but with her failed gubernatorial campaign’s simultaneous use of Superfeed’s app during the 2022 midterm election. But despite the candidate’s ongoing business relationship with Superfeed, the Lake campaign never disclosed payments to the company until after The Daily Beast inquired about the missing expenses, eventually paying out shortly after she lost the election and just weeks before the company’s license was reinstated, filings show.

Again, this alone is quite a story, and reading the whole piece raises some interesting questions about the way Dewit may have been paying Lake during her Gubernatorial bid:

As we read on, we learn that this tech platform with virtually no paper trail is being used by 18 entities (according to app store data), "including four Republican state parties, an Arizona GOP state House campaign, multiple conservative news sites, and right-wing activists like Scott Presler, Moms for America, and MAGA pillow king Mike Lindell. Yet records of any payment to Superfeed for the creation of these products are scarce, even in cases where state or federal laws require disclosure for political expenses or donated professional services."

Thanks to Will Bredderman, we knew in Nov, 2022 that Superfeed appeared to be essentially providing free development services to Republican campaigns in Arizona - with four apps being created and used by GOPers that we are aware of, and "More than a thousand Android users and an unknown number of iPhone holders to date have downloaded the tool, which provides regular updates from Lake’s social media feed, notifies users of campaign events, and connects them with donation and volunteer sign-up portals." This was all provided for free, as far as anyone can tell - which, if true, may well have violated campaign finance rules. But the apparently stealthy growth of this platform outside of Arizona outlined in Sollenberger's piece is new information.

And then we read this:

Perhaps most notably, Superfeed also powers the app for Arizona-based MAGA youth group Turning Point USA, and for its political arm Turning Point Action. Both organizations have significant direct ties to the Superfeed corporate board, including Superfeed’s chair, who holds a concurrent senior leadership role at Turning Point.

Those ties appeared in the filings Superfeed submitted this month to reinstate its business license in Arizona. They came in just days before NBC News reported that the app was central to suspicions currently ricocheting among state and national party members about the “grift” at the heart of Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk’s power play inside the Republican National Committee.

“This is why [Kirk] was trying to get rid of Ronna,” one Trump ally told NBC, referring to longtime RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who was ousted this month. “He shouldn’t make it sound like, ‘Oh, we’re tired of losing. We don’t have an early vote program.’ He should have just said, ‘Listen, he who controls the RNC controls millions of dollars and I want to get my hands on them.’ I mean, that would have been a more honest grift.”

To put this in context, we need to understand the timeline - but first (and the relevance of this will be clear soon), it's worth noting Charlie Kirk's relationship with the Christian nationalist movement - specifically with the 'seven mountains' dominionist movement and its prominent members.

As early as February, 2020, Kirk was embracing this movement - the New Apostolic Reformation - that believes it is the duty of Christians to capture the seven "mountains" of society and leverage them to create a Christian kingdom in the world until Jesus returns.

Feb 27, 2020:

In his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday morning, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk declared enthusiastically, “Finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence.” Many CPAC attendees and online viewers may have missed the quick reference to seven mountains dominionism—sometimes called the seven mountains mandate—whose proponents argue that God wants a certain kind of Christian to be in charge of all the “mountains” or spheres of cultural influence: government, media, education, business, arts and entertainment, church and family.

In mid-2020, a man named Floyd Brown - who was a founder of Citizens United and is a very outspoken NAR/seven mountains dominionist - created SuperFeed (the earliest archive of its website is from June 2, 2020). It's unclear exactly when the company's leadership changed hands, but at some point in the last half of 2020, Jim Dewit became CEO.

In 2020, the year DeWit took the reins as CEO, the website’s origin story declared that “Superfeed was created when certain social medias switched their algorithms, making it hard for people to find the news and information they were looking for,” creating a “gap in the market” for users and content generators alike.

That would also appear tailor-made for the needs of Superfeed’s founding family—conservative activist Floyd Brown, whose son Patrick, served as Superfeed’s first president. (Kathryn Brown was secretary.)

The Browns were for a time heroes of conservative alt-media. Their fringe-right outlet Western Journal exerted a profound influence in alternative conservative media as Trump ascended to power—until both Google and Apple blacklisted it for misinformation in 2019, decimating its readership. Now, Western Journal has a Superfeed-powered app on both online stores.
[The Western Journal app was published two years ago, and according to the app store was still being updated/maintained as of last month, so it's clear that the Browns still have some level of involvement/relationship]

As recently as summer 2022, the site advertised “an unbiased, personalized outlet for real news curating all of your favorite sources in one place.” But Superfeed appears to have embraced a new market—political groups.

The clearest picture of Superfeed’s business today is found on Apple and Google app stores. Those listings show at least 18 entities currently use Superfeed-powered apps, including Republican party organizations in four critical battlegrounds—Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—as well as in blue-tinged Colorado, which still has powerful Republican strongholds. Meanwhile, both Google and Apple offer a “Team Michigan” app by Superfeed to push content from Turning Point and other conservative sources in that key state. The precise nature of Team Michigan’s affiliation with any official political organization—in a state where the GOP power structure has split into two competing factions—is still unclear.

A few conservative media outlets also promote apps built on Superfeed, including Western Journal and Conservative News America. The vast majority of clients, however, are political organizations, who use the app like a day planner to manage staff, scheduling, contacts, and the like. Those clients include Arizona state House candidate Austin Smith, Lindell, Moms for America, and MAGA influencer Scott Presler.

As an illustration that Kirk, Brown, and others continue to be involved in the NAR movement: In September, 2022, Kirk appeared on the Lance Wallnau show. Wallnau is the de facto leader of the NAR movement, if it can be said to have one; the 'Seven Mountains Mandate' was his creation. In January, 2024, Floyd Brown became Kari Lake's campaign chair, and around the same time, Brown invited Michael Flynn to join the board of directors at Conservative Broadcast Media & Journalism Inc.

"General Michael Flynn is the leader of America's opposition to globalization and government tyranny. He works relentlessly to unite Americans behind the Founding Fathers' vision for our future. It would only make sense for him to take a leadership role in a broadcast outlet. Patriot.TV is committed to this vision,” stated Floyd Brown, Director of CBMJ and founder of Patriot.TV.

On February 9, Brown appeared on "His Glory TV," and briefly described capturing the "mountains." Watch:

Which brings us to today:

In an Instagram post last October, Presler boasted that his Superfeed app was doing numbers.

“My app, Early Vote Action, is making waves,” Presler wrote in the caption, alongside a screenshot that showed the app ranked ahead of the New York Post and USA Today. He claimed that the app had “10,000 active users,” and can be used “to make phone calls, send text messages, and knock doors.” Early Vote Action’s federal PAC doesn’t report any payments to Superfeed in its FEC filings.

Early Vote Action did not respond to repeated queries for this piece. Pillow mogul Lindell, however, told The Daily Beast that he “got the app through TPUSA," specifically through its COO Tyler Bowyer.

Lindell said that two of his organizations, Cause of America and Election Crime Bureau, use the app. The top function, he explained, was for “citizen reporting,” whereby private individuals use their mobile devices to report names and locations they suspect are involved in voting fraud—like turning in a next-door neighbor, Lindell gave by way of an example. That info goes through the app, and the Election Crime Bureau endeavors to verify it and pass it along to authorities.

However, the cushion tycoon said he was unfamiliar with the payment structure worked out with Superfeed and couldn’t speak to it.
Outside the app stores, however, the trail gets colder.

To be clear, we can't be sure how many of these numbers and statements are accurate, and how much can be chalked up to boasting and self-marketing. What is interesting though, is that these details appear to be congruent with other known facts, and dovetail with a couple of other important stories - both recent and current.

As noted earlier, Charlie Kirk has been vocally pushing to unseat Ronna McDaniel for quite some time; a search of his twitter timeline can confirm as much. He has been on a mission. But what wasn't widely known previously was that during the time Kirk was pushing for RNC leadership changes, and citing what he claimed was poor GOTV/vote chasing efforts, he and his allies had been building their own platform to perform those roles.

On February 18, NBC reported that Kirk played a significant role in influencing Trump to change RNC leadership (Donald Trump Jr. has previously been quoted as saying RNC folks maligning him are simply jealous because Kirk has become so close with the Trump family, which corroborates that to some extent).

“Turning Point probably played a 10% role in getting members to be like, ‘We’ve got to get rid of Ronna,’” a former senior RNC official said. “But I do think in Trump’s orbit, and with Don Jr. and those types of people, I think they played a humongous role.”

Then there’s the fact that unlike other players, Turning Point USA’s reach goes beyond Kirk’s outside influence campaign and directly into the RNC. Bowyer, Kirk’s right hand, became an RNC committeeman in Arizona in 2020, a move critics say was key to the group’s overt influence over the state GOP. During his ascent within Turning Point USA and Republican politics, Bowyer became the chairman of Superfeed.

Around the party’s winter gathering this month, Bowyer discussed Superfeed’s app with several RNC members in meetings that left some who attended concerned the focus was as much on diverting resources from the the Republican Party to the Turning Point organizations as it was on improving the party’s voter engagement efforts.

It's worth noting that most RNC members and insiders simply see Kirk as an opportunistic grifter who is putting the RNC's solvency at risk for his own benefit, and that may well be - according to NBC, Turning Point has funneled at least $15 million to its associates and their affiliated organizations - but there are still two aspects to all of this that warrant scrutiny and attention.

The first of these is that, if Kirk is successful to any real extent, the RNC and at least some state Republican Parties will no longer own their voter data. That valuable data will be migrated and come under the ownership of a financially shady company that, if appearances are true, are controlled by a group of radical Christian Nationalists and their associates.

Bowyer pitched the idea of state and county Republican parties across the country purchasing the new app, which helps organize things like text message campaigns, the creation of custom voter contact lists for phone banking and programs to help organize grassroots door knocking campaigns.

That data would then be kept by Superfeed — not the RNC, state or local parties — and could then be packaged and re-sold for a significant asking price.

“Superfeed securely collects data from every interaction and survey response, storing it securely in our expansive user database, in real time,” read a slide from one of the company’s presentations, which was shared with NBC News.

The apps that are developed by Superfeed and used by these groups also collect a large amount of personally identifiable information from their users - essentially everyone they can convince to install their apps. That data, when de-duplicated, warehoused, and combined with other datasets, can be very valuable, so there is a high chance that it will be used as a revenue stream - but the second, larger point of concern is how they may use the data themselves.

As mentioned earlier, Mike Lindell is already using a Superfeed app to have MAGA activists report "Election Crime," vigilante style; essentially having citizens report on their neighbors. And while this may not seem outlandish or terribly shocking considering the recent history of the characters involved, a somewhat alarming story in the Times deserves our attention.

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an active-duty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.

The purge in Waterford went unnoticed by state election officials until The New York Times discovered it. The Michigan secretary of state’s office has since told the clerk to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow the process laid out in state and federal law, and issued a warning to the state’s 1,600 clerks.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

[...]

It is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error. A Times review of challenges in swing states, which included public records, interviews and audio recordings, suggested the activists were rarely as effective at removing voters as they were in Waterford.

But even when they fail, the challenges have consequences. In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter’s access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory.

At the same time, right-wing media outlets have promoted the challenges, casting public officials as corrupt and creating fodder that could be used in another round of legal challenges should Mr. Trump lose again.

“It really is aimed at being able to cast doubt on the results after the fact,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization. “But also, before the election itself, at being able to shape who turns out and how they turn out.”

[...]

The undertaking pulls from every corner of the election-denial movement. Its parent group is an offshoot of Ms. Mitchell’s national network. A top deputy to Mike Lindell, a leading promoter of election-related conspiracy theories, helped conceive of the data program the activists use to hunt for suspicious voters, according to recordings reviewed by The Times. The state’s Republican Party, which is mired in a leadership dispute, has also endorsed the data program, and the Trump campaign cited its numbers in a misinformation-riddled report released in January.

That program, called Check My Vote, identifies addresses with irregularities, such as missing an apartment number or having an unusually high number of registered voters.

In training sessions, Tim Vetter, a developer of the system, has acknowledged that it turned up large numbers of supposedly questionable voters in dense areas of Detroit and in student housing in Ann Arbor, both overwhelmingly Democratic cities.

Activists can then use the data to assemble lists of voters to challenge. The program also tracks the outcome of the challenge and whether a voter later tries to vote, information that could be shared with election officials or law enforcement, Mr. Vetter has said, according to recordings reviewed by The Times.

Pulling all these threads together, the picture that takes shape is a nationwide, data-driven, crowd-sourced effort working in earnest to disqualify as many voters as is technically possible - in some cases illegally, if they can strongarm local election officials with legitimate sounding legal jargon. And Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network (which this author has been writing about for years on Twitter) is collaborating with Mike Lindell, who is using software that appears may be a backend for frontend apps written by the Charlie Kirk and dominionist group's Superfeed company - which is conspicuously a financial ghost, for all practical purposes.

Superfeed’s revenue figures are publicly unavailable, and public records like campaign finance reports and tax filings yield almost no trace of the company. The company has submitted one lone filing with the SEC, which shows that the startup authorized the sale of up to $25 million shares in January 2021. While the filing—submitted under what’s called a 506(b) exemption—indicates that the company authorized sales to as many as 35 non-accredited investors, the report itself was only required to list the first sale.

That sale, however, turned out to be a $250,000 investment from Michael Gibbons—the banker who later ran a self-funded campaign in Ohio’s vicious 2022 GOP Senate primary, where he nearly came to blows with another candidate during a debate. Gibbons’ candidate financial disclosure listed shares in Superfeed valued between $250,000 and $500,000.

It’s also impossible to gauge Superfeed’s size through known transactions. That’s because there are hardly any records of political groups paying Superfeed, even though it has powered apps for a number of political entities and campaigns in recent years.

For instance, Turning Point Action has used the app since at least 2022—when Superfeed’s Arizona business license was revoked—but has never reported any payments to the company on its Federal Election Commission filings. The group’s tax returns to date don’t show any Superfeed expenses, either, though their 2022 return lists payouts of $107,000 and above to three other communications consultants. According to an Associated Press report last October, Turning Point uses the app to manage voter outreach efforts—a project that boasts a $108 million budget.

It seems clear that Superfeed has significant financing. Where is it coming from? Are they giving services like this - including the service of building custom apps themselves - to political campaigns for free? There are many more questions than answers here, but the answers increasingly appear to be important.

While Lake’s own losing gubernatorial campaign also deployed the app in 2022, it didn’t report any payments to Superfeed until after The Daily Beast revealed she was using the app. Arizona campaign finance filings show two $3,000 payments from the Lake campaign after the election—the only recorded Superfeed payments from any political committee in the state. Lake’s financial disclosure last month indicates that she was collecting a sizable income from the company at the time.

Two Arizona Republicans at the federal level also used the app in 2022. One campaign, for failed House contender Kelly Cooper, previously told The Daily Beast that they were hazy about the extent of their use of Superfeed, later reporting a $250 payment the day before the general election, FEC records show. The second campaign, for GOP Senate primary candidate Jim Lamon, did not file any Superfeed outlays. Lamon, it turns out, was also on Superfeed’s board as of 2021, according to the SEC filing.

In fact, federal campaign disclosures show Superfeed payments from only two committees—Cooper (who is running again in 2024) along with the “Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund” super PAC. But those filings indicate that the app commands a relatively high price point on the market. Tea Party Patriots has reported $110,000 starting last April, at an apparent monthly billing rate of $10,000. Lake, who served as Superfeed’s communications director, only reported paying $6,000.

Similarly, there are no records of payments to Superfeed in Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado, or Georgia for the Republican apps in those states. The party organizations for whom the apps were built did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Arizona state filings only return Lake’s campaign payments, with no outlays from the state Republican Party, which also has a Superfeed-powered app.

This raises questions about how and where Superfeed derives revenue besides through Turning Point. Because it turns out that while Lake’s campaign was paying Superfeed, Superfeed was also paying her—and paying her a lot.

And to cap all this off, we have an inconceivable level of opacity, while Republican Party members appear to be boasting that they can use these services for free. Your humble author is not a campaign finance expert, but these appear to be pretty serious red flags that bear much deeper scrutiny.

Superfeed’s annual reports to the state of Arizona show a number of blown deadlines. After the state approved its amended business articles in Oct. 2020, Superfeed failed to file an annual report for more than two years, missing all of 2021 and nearly all of 2022, filing its statements for 2020, 2021, and 2022 on Dec. 9 of that year. In the interim, the state yanked Superfeed’s authority to do business in Arizona, according to a notice sent to the company in December 2021.

This means that Superfeed was not authorized to conduct business in Arizona during the 2022 campaign, when Lake, Lamon, Cooper, Smith, and Turning Point Action were all using the app. Lake was also collecting payments from the company while its license was suspended.

Superfeed appears to have missed yet another deadline last year, filing its 2023 annual report on Feb. 14 this year, submitting its 2024 report on the same day.

Last month, DeWit promoted Superfeed at an Arizona Republican Party meeting, even as his future as party chair hung in the balance. In those remarks, DeWit acknowledged that Superfeed was building an app for the state GOP, but promised that it “won’t cost the party a penny.”

“I’m very proud of my time at Superfeed,” DeWit told members, responding to a question about potential conflict of interest between his corporate and party roles. He promised the audience that “anything the state party uses that’s Superfeed-related won’t cost the party a penny,” citing an “agreement” with the company “to donate anything we use, for free.”

Clearly some of this is speculation - particularly the role being played by Kirk and associates, and whether they are powering Lindell's application - but it is speculation by necessity, due to an unprecedented level of apparent financial secrecy, for an organization that, by all accounts, should be leaving a much deeper paper trail. Even the most forgiving assessment leaves us with the fact that state Parties are receiving services from a group that is so ineptly managed that it is unable to maintain even basic accounting standards. The worst case scenario, if we are forced to imagine such outcomes, might be an organization intentionally hiding its finances while it participates in a quiet effort to disenfranchise voters nationwide.

If even a portion of the speculation is borne out, we may come to regret not knowing more.