Bloomberg's $60M Gun Control Machine

Inside the Astroturf Infrastructure That Hijacked Minnesota Tragedy

When Robin Westman's bullets shattered the hearts of Annunciation Catholic School families on that August morning, the grief was immediate and raw. The political response was equally swift—but that speed tells a different story than the one Everytown for Gun Safety wants you to hear.

Within hours of the tragedy, press releases had been crafted, hashtags were trending, and rally organizers were making calls. By the next day, Everytown affiliates stood on Minnesota's Capitol steps with professionally printed signs and coordinated messaging. This wasn't grassroots organizing. It was the activation of a pre-existing political machine.

The Players Behind the Playbook

Behind this machine's smooth operation stand figures like Chad Kuyper, who embodies the sophisticated local infrastructure Everytown has built across America. As a leader with Minnesota's Moms Demand Action chapter, Kuyper also holds a position as a professor at Normandale Community College in communications. This dual role isn't coincidental—it's strategic.

The combination of academic authority and activist organizing exemplifies how Everytown embeds its network within established institutions to lend credibility to rapid responses. When Kuyper appeared at press conferences following the Annunciation shooting, he wasn't just a concerned citizen speaking from the heart. He was a trained spokesperson for an organization that had spent months preparing for exactly this type of moment. His academic credentials provided legitimacy. His organizational role ensured the message stayed on script.

The Funding Pipeline Exposed

The true scope of Everytown's infrastructure becomes clear only when examining its financial arrangements, and those arrangements reveal a web of organizations. Designed to obscure the source and flow of political funding. Public IRS filings expose how in 2022, Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund directed $250,000 to Stronger America Inc., a 501(c)(4) registered just months earlier. That quarter-million dollars represented Stronger America's only reported gross receipt that year. Effectively making it a pass-through vehicle within Everytown's broader strategy.

The Bloomberg Election Machine

To understand the full scope of this infrastructure, one needs only examine Everytown's 2020 electoral spending. The organization committed $60 million to the election cycle, double its 2018 spending and more than the NRA invested in 2016. This wasn't just advocacy. It was electoral warfare funded by Bloomberg's personal fortune.

The Everytown Political Machine

Bloomberg's Network Infrastructure for Rapid Political Response

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

Founder & Primary Financial Architect

Initial Investment: $50M+ 2020 Electoral: $60M Personal Campaign: $540M

EVERYTOWN FOR GUN SAFETY

Established: 2014

Annual Operations: $45M+

Network Scale: 11M Members

Response Time: <72 Hours

Organizational Architecture

501(c)(3) Educational

Everytown Support Fund

Research & Education

501(c)(4) Political

Everytown Action Fund

Lobbying & Advocacy

Legal Division

Everytown Law

Strategic Litigation

Electoral PAC

Everytown Victory Fund

Campaign Operations

RAPID RESPONSE INFRASTRUCTURE

Pre-Positioned Assets

Professional response teams

Pre-drafted messaging frameworks

Established media relationships

Coordinated affiliate activation

Initial Activation (24 Hours)

Press release deployment

Social media narrative launch

Media blitz coordination

Strategic narrative deployment

Full Mobilization (48 Hours)

Capitol demonstration coordination

Professional materials production

Multi-organization synchronization

Political momentum generation

Bloomberg's parallel campaign spending reveals the coordination between his political interests and Everytown's advocacy work. While his presidential campaign spent over $540 million on advertising, Bloomberg simultaneously funneled resources through Everytown to support Joe Biden's candidacy. The timeline tells the story: In March 2020, Everytown endorsed Biden. This was followed by Bloomberg's own endorsement after dropping out of the race.

This coordinated approach allowed Bloomberg to influence the election through multiple channels simultaneously. Direct campaign spending, Super PAC investments, and "advocacy" through Everytown that blurred the lines between issue advocacy and electoral campaigning—all working in concert to achieve the same political objectives.

The Democracy Alliance Connection

The funding architecture extends far beyond Bloomberg's direct contributions, reaching into a broader network of progressive infrastructure that includes organizations like NEO Philanthropy, which serves as a financial pass-through for progressive causes. While direct connections between Everytown and Democracy Alliance funding streams remain partially obscured by the complexity of modern political finance, the pattern of coordination suggests broader progressive infrastructure alignment.

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Consider the numbers: NEO Philanthropy distributed over $6.7 million in grants to left-aligned advocacy groups in 2022. These included organizations that share messaging and tactical approaches with Everytown. This creates an ecosystem where funding flows through multiple channels to support coordinated advocacy efforts that appear grassroots but operate with institutional backing.

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The result is a sophisticated network that can mobilize resources and messaging across multiple organizations while maintaining the appearance of independent, organic advocacy.

The Strategy Behind the Speed

The rapid response capability that emerged after the Annunciation shooting wasn't spontaneous—it was the inevitable result of systematic preparation and professional infrastructure. Everytown maintains pre-positioned staff, pre-drafted messaging materials, and pre-established media relationships that enable "turnkey responses" to tragic events.This infrastructure allows the organization to dominate media attention and political conversation within hours of a shooting. It shapes public discourse before organic grassroots responses can develop, before communities can process their grief, before authentic local voices can emerge. While genuine grassroots movements require days or weeks to organize meaningful responses, Everytown's machine activates with the efficiency of a political campaign. Because that's essentially what it is.

The organization's own materials reveal this strategic approach with remarkable candor. According to Everytown's mission statement, they focus on building "a movement" through "grassroots organizing in every state" and "demanding action from elected officials". But the speed and coordination of their responses suggest something more akin to astroturfing. Artificial grassroots activity designed to simulate organic public sentiment.

The Hate Crime Narrative

Perhaps nowhere is Everytown's sophisticated messaging strategy more apparent than in its approach to framing individual tragedies within broader ideological narratives. The organization's focus on hate crimes involving firearms, claiming that over 25,000 such incidents annually involve guns. Thus, provides a pre-constructed framework for politicizing local tragedies within national political conversations.

By positioning incidents like the Annunciation shooting within this larger hate crime framework, Everytown transforms local grief into national political momentum. The organization's materials explicitly connect "guns and hate" as a "fatal combination". This creates rhetorical frameworks that can be rapidly deployed regardless of the specific circumstances of individual incidents.

The strategy is both elegant and cynical. It allows the organization to move quickly from tragedy to political action while appearing to address the root causes of violence.

The Infrastructure Advantage

What emerged on Minnesota's Capitol steps in the aftermath of the Annunciation shooting wasn't solidarity. It was the visible manifestation of a sophisticated political operation. Designed to appear grassroots, while operating with the resources and coordination of a major political campaign. The speed of response told the story. So did the quality of messaging materials and the coordination across multiple affiliate organizations. Together, they revealed an infrastructure that exists in standby mode, ready to activate whenever tragedy strikes.

This infrastructure provides significant advantages over genuine grassroots organizing, advantages that fundamentally alter the democratic conversation around tragic events. Professional staff can craft messages tested through polling and focus groups. Established media relationships ensure coverage that amplifies predetermined narratives. Pre-positioned resources enable immediate mobilization that drowns out slower, more authentic community responses.

The result is political theater that mimics authentic community response while serving broader ideological objectives.

The Cost of Speed

The families and friends of Annunciation Catholic School deserved space to grieve. They deserved time to process. They deserved the opportunity to determine their own responses to tragedy. Instead, they found themselves sharing the spotlight with a political operation that had been preparing for their moment of pain long before it arrived.

That preparation—and the speed with which it activated—reveals more about modern political advocacy than any mission statement or press release ever could. It shows how genuine human suffering becomes raw material for political campaigns. How tragedy becomes opportunity. How grief becomes leverage.

In the end, the speed of Everytown's response wasn't a sign of compassion or genuine grassroots concern. It was evidence of a machine designed to capitalize on the most vulnerable moments in American communities, transforming authentic pain into political power with the efficiency of a Fortune 500 corporation and the moral clarity of a true believer.