Eric J Morey
@ericjmorey.com
1K followers 1.1K following 4.5K posts
ericjmorey.com Democratic Candidate for Cape May County Commissioner Born and raised in NJ This has become my primary outlet for keeping informed about the political troubles in the USA.
![Mercer and his daughter Rebekah helped to obtain senior roles in the Trump campaign for Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.[31] Rebekah worked with Conway on the Cruz Super-PAC Keep the Promise in the 2016 Republican primaries.[13] Mercer also financed a Super PAC, Make America Number One, which supported Trump's campaign.[31] Nick Patterson, a former colleague of Mercer's said in 2017 that Trump would not have been elected without Mercer's support.[17]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d54dngaezfynacht56mgz66c/bafkreihwrtavcwk4u6vc3fe5yd4veth5a6smqrl4gzcftsryook3u7l3gu)
![Mercer was an activist in the campaign for the United Kingdom to end its membership of the European Union, also known as Brexit. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, said that Mercer donated the services of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people's Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit.[37]
It has been reported that Cambridge Analytica has undisclosed links to Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ, which also played a pivotal role in Dominic Cummings' Vote Leave campaign, where he delivered an estimated one billion individually curated targeted adverts to voters in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, in contravention of established voting rules. Neither Vote Leave nor Leave.EU informed the UK electoral commission of the donation despite the fact that a law demands that all donations valued over £7,500 must be reported. In 2018, the (UK) Electoral Commission found the Vote Leave campaign guilty of breaking electoral law.[37]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d54dngaezfynacht56mgz66c/bafkreib6iuyntbyvu53zqjypepxeq2ahesvcjzudzczb3bhmqz3ov2yf3a)
![Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists.[17]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d54dngaezfynacht56mgz66c/bafkreicad6wbk4phvj472wecw5kaysud4ez5jy22wzoizk4pxgcjfyudba)
![Mercer played a controversial role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, led by Dominic Cummings, with £3.9 million being spent on his data analytics and machine learning company AggregateIQ. [5] He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News,[6] the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica,[7] and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president.[8] He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.[9]
In November 2017, Mercer announced he would step down from Renaissance Technologies and sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters.[10] He was the majority owner of SCL Group, a self-described "global elections management agency",[11] before it was dissolved in 2018.[3] In 2021, Mercer was involved in possibly the largest tax settlement in U.S. history, as he, James Simons, and other executives at the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies were ordered to pay as much as $7 billion to the IRS in back taxes.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d54dngaezfynacht56mgz66c/bafkreibxxb6wezvmmrrrxrbh5xgovu5icq742h53mesqkbcm2odsi5nmv4)
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