Matthew Vadum’s Townhall Magazine Article on ACORN

Townhall magazine has published my long article on ACORN in the August issue.

The article is called, “Stealing Democracy,” and with permission from the magazine, we repost the article here. (PDF)

Here is the beginning of the article:

In the parallel universe occupied by many left-of-center Americans, the increasingly controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a high-minded poor people’s group similar to crusading civil rights groups of the 1960s. They believe ACORN is a public-spirited organization that registers the poor to vote and encourages citizen involvement in morally uplifting projects and community development. They believe it spurs production of affordable housing, protects tenants’ rights, keeps unjustly exploited borrowers in their homes and rages against predatory lenders. They believe it fights for the rights of workers, immigrants and utility ratepayers.

But it does so much more. When the extortion and vote fraud conglomerate ACORN isn’t busing schoolchildren to the nation’s capital to protest proposed tax cuts, it’s busy campaigning to expand the size and scope of government, raising the dead from cemeteries and leading them to the voting booth, and promoting the so-called Fairness Doctrine in order to bludgeon conservative-dominated talk radio. […]