Remember When Hurricane Florence Was Used To Launch A Personal Campaign Website? Mark Johnson’s www.ncsuperintendent.com

/ caffeinatedrage

Remember that website Mark Johnson created to deal with Hurricane Florence 14 months ago that looked like a campaign website?

The one that he still refers to continuously in his glossy flyers and multiple emails?

Well, now that he is running for Lt. Gov. it makes even more sense.

From September 14, 2018 on this blog:

When State Superintendent Mark Johnson launched a new “personal” website (www.ncsuperintendent.com) this week that takes advantage of his title and position and negates all other personnel in DPI what he actually did was to create an unethically built campaign website using public resources.

Even if it was done with no taxpayer money (it was set up in GoDaddy.com) , branding it with a publicly held state department and using DPI’s actual site to advertise it is still using taxpayer resources to maintain the new website’s profile and reach.

And it is using the emergency that is Hurricane Florence to manipulate people looking at it and using it for information that the already existent DPI website provides without a bias to it.

This was sent out to DPI employess this week.

notice

It says,

Due to the potential impact of Hurricane Florence, DPI Technology Services will be following the guidance of the N.C. Department of Information Technology and shutting down the DPI data center at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 13.

The following services will be affected by the shutdown:

    • The DPI building wired network and wireless network
    • The DPI website ncpublicschools.org (NCsuperintendent.com and parts of stateboard.ncpublicschools.gov will not be affected)
    • HRMS – Human Resource Management System
    • NcWise Owl – Learning resources for the suite of HomeBase applications
    • NC-SIS – Learning resources for the suite of HomeBase applications
    • Financial and business applications hosted here at DPI such as Salary Compliance, Cash Management, Host on Demand and XNet would be unavailable within the building.

Ironic that the Raleigh area still has power and that every other state agency’s websites are still up and functional. And now people will have to go to a website that masquerades as a service but actually is a campaign site that only serves one person: Mark Johnson.

How can one tell if it is a campaign website? Every element of it is something that most campaign websites would have.

  1. It has links to social media outlets.

social media

2. It collects names and information from people to build a database for the upcoming 2020 election cycle.

johnson1

3. It highlights a priority list of issues that sound like campaign talking points.

priorities

4, There is a “get to know me” section to introduce himself to voters.

meet me

 

5. It offers press releases that are highly favorable to one person: Mark Johnson.

press releases

6. It offers plenty of “PR” pictures and running video for the one person that the website serves: Mark Johnson.

pr.png

7. One can request a “campaign” visit from the site.

contact

8. It’s a .com and not a .org. 

.com

The only two specific things that are missing that might make it the most blatant campaign website ever are that it there is not a “donations” page or a place to sign up to be a volunteer. And one cannot have those two things unless one has already declared to be running for an office which Johnson has not.

But that rumor mill has been running for a while and http://www.ncsuperintendent.com is not really hiding any intentions here.

And it’s launching literally without any other “DPI’ related site available because of the hurricane.

It smells like those hog waste pits that are being overrun by rising waters.