Board of Aldermen Page 27
September 27, 2016
501C3 and in the 990 they talk about the programs and how they spend and how they get their money.
This particular organization when it was first born had a big grant. Can anybody tell me where the
money came from? Nobody knows. Everybody wants to find out some magic boogeyman or whatever
but nobody seems to know where the money came from and | find that very interesting a little troubling.
It's not a conspiracy theory but it’s very unusual for a charitable organization to start-up like that with
absolutely no idea where its founding money comes from. In those 990’s you can also see where this
goes and how did it get their money and you can see it year by year. By the way, | will steal a line from a
CBS News investigator reporter who was describing these “grass roots” organizations; he called them
AstroTurf because they are not real grass roots. This would be that. The claim is that these are grass
roots organizations but in fact, the funding is not grass roots by any means. Again, it doesn’t necessarily
make it a bad thing but it’s kind of a little troubling. | look at that and | feel a little bit funny and even the
notations in the tax returns say they are supposed to get 1/3 of their funding after a while through public
means but that’s not happening except through fees. Their programs charge money and that’s how they
are sort of getting the additional support to get above that threshold according to the returns. But again,
that’s not necessarily a disqualifying element, every charity when it first starts off usually starts off with a
particular grant from a benefactor and they are given a number of years to get to that threshold. It’s a
little curious that the benefactors are a little unknown and that’s sort of troubling. Now, a lot of people
have said that they have gone on the website and I’ve carefully studied the website. Okay, fair enough.
l’ve gone on the website and frankly, a lot of it is gobble gook but there is nothing incriminating or evil
about gobble gook, it’s just the type of vacuous verbiage that we often see in a lot of organizations.
However, if one does go through the resources; | believe what is the...there is a learn and then there is a
resources page and then you can actually...you have to go through a lot of clicks and actually make a
real effort to download the actual documentation; those real PDF’s. Some people do it and some people
don’t, | did it. Some of the phrases in here are a little bit troubling because what does this really do, it’s
basically a primmer on how to put your message together to get passed the fact that people are skeptical
but not really in a friendly way the way | look at it, to me it looks very manipulative. Let me quote “use
these message themes to frame and introduce your stories, add to your materials and as fodder for
social media posts.” That’s kind of interesting. “Perception/Reality, about messaging.” This is on page 7
of a document called Stand Together. “A person’s opinion isn’t based on reality, it’s based on their
perception of reality. Listen to and understand your audience perceived reality and then craft your
messages to resonate with it and use these new messages to reshape perception.” Okay, now | kind of
have a little problem with this Orwellian approach to something which supposedly is virtuous. By the
way, one can actually look deeper into the actual overall theme of several of them because it’s not like
it's welcoming all of the immigrants that can certainly contribute to our community. It’s very specifically
targeted at a very specific segment which | think is unfortunate because it does everyone else a
disservice. | leave it up to you folks to vote because in this politically correct world | can’t mention
anything because of course, I'll get skewered one way or the other. | think actually that’s unfair. So we
have some very specific targeted group that then there is a specific means and there are a number of
these in here and that’s just one document; there are actually two specific documents where it’s sort of
this Orwellian message twisting mechanism that you can use as part of your toolkit. | find that a little
frightening and so | don’t want to be associated with that. I’m sorry, | find that unfortunate. Nashua is a
virtuous city. | think we are a great and welcoming city. Why do we have to be a city that needs to
associate with an organization that puts out as a toolkit an Orwellian message twisting machine? For
what purpose and funded by who? Why can’t | find that? | searched literally for three hours and | am
very open-minded about it, I’m not trying to find some evil...like oh, this is George Soros. If it is then it is,
| don’t care. | just want to know who is behind this and why. That’s sort of a little bit of a problem for me.
Again, we have a great city and we do well on our own. We already had a proclamation that Alderman
Cookson said something about which is hey, we are welcoming and so we also had out of committee a
message that was the same. We stripped ourselves of this, which | think people legitimately have
concerns with, | certainly did. They are not uneducated and by the way, | don’t believe that there is a
political motivation, in fact, in committee, | cautioned the Aldermen; we are not allowed to subscribe
motive to people’s reasoning. That is part of our code of conduct. To the extent that had happened to
me, shame on everyone, that’s not okay. I’m not subscribing motive, | think the motives are pure. | think
what happened is people just don’t research enough. | think all of the people who testified today did so
