XPost: alt.california, comp.os.linux.advocacy, sac.politics   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns   
   From: newsom@blows.boys   
      
   By Charles Duhigg   
   October 7, 2024   
   The corner of dollar bills laid out in a grid representing binary code.   
   A person familiar with Fairshake, a super pac, said that the group had   
   “a simple message”: “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if   
   you are anti we will tear you apart.”Illustration by Javier Jaén   
      
   One morning in February, Katie Porter was sitting in bed, futzing   
   around on her computer, when she learned that she was the target of a   
   vast techno-political conspiracy. For the past five years, Porter had   
   served in the House of Representatives on behalf of Orange County,   
   California. She’d become famous—at least, C-span and MSNBC famous—for   
   her eviscerations of business tycoons, often aided by a whiteboard that   
   she used to make camera-friendly presentations about corporate greed.   
   Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California   
   senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The   
   primary was in three weeks.   
      
   A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The   
   staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying   
   airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy.   
   Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.   
      
   Porter was bewildered. She had raised thirty million dollars to   
   bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that   
   some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her,   
   she told me, seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is   
   Fairshake?’ ”   
      
   Porter did some frantic Googling and discovered that Fairshake was a   
   super PAC funded primarily by three tech firms involved in the   
   cryptocurrency industry. In the House, Porter had been loosely   
   affiliated with Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken advocate of   
   financial regulation, and with the progressive wing of the Democratic   
   Party. But Porter hadn’t been particularly vocal about cryptocurrency;   
   she hadn’t taken much of a position on the industry one way or the   
   other. As she continued investigating Fairshake, she found that her   
   neutrality didn’t matter. A Web site politically aligned with Fairshake   
   had deemed her “very anti-crypto”—though the evidence offered for this   
   verdict was factually incorrect. The site claimed that she had opposed   
   a pro-crypto bill in a House committee vote: in fact, she wasn’t on the   
   committee and hadn’t voted at all.   
      
   Soon afterward, Fairshake began airing attack ads on television. They   
   didn’t mention cryptocurrencies or anything tech-related. Rather, they   
   called Porter a “bully” and a “liar,” and falsely implied that she’d   
   recently accepted campaign contributions from major pharmaceutical and   
   oil companies. Nothing in the ads disclosed Fairshake’s affiliation   
   with Silicon Valley, its support of cryptocurrency, or its larger   
   political aims. The negative campaign had a palpable effect: Porter,   
   who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming   
   in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote. But, according to a   
   person familiar with Fairshake, the super PAC’s intent wasn’t simply to   
   damage her. The group’s backers didn’t care all that much about Porter.   
   Rather, the person familiar with Fairshake said, the goal of the attack   
   campaign was to terrify other politicians—“to warn anyone running for   
   office that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”   
      
   The super PAC and two affiliates soon revealed in federal filings that   
   they had collected more than a hundred and seventy million dollars,   
   which they could spend on political races across the nation in 2024,   
   with more donations likely to come. That was more than nearly any other   
   super PAC, including Preserve America, which supports Donald Trump, and   
   WinSenate, which aims to help Democrats reclaim that chamber. Pro-   
   crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate   
   donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has   
   become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation. The point of   
   all that money, like of the attack on Porter, has been to draw   
   attention to Silicon Valley’s financial might—and to prove that its   
   leaders are capable of political savagery in order to protect their   
   interests. “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake   
   said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we   
   will tear you apart.”   
      
   After Porter’s defeat, it became obvious that the super PAC’s message   
   had been received by politicians elsewhere. Candidates in New York,   
   Arizona, Maryland, and Michigan began releasing crypto-friendly public   
   statements and voting for pro-crypto bills. When Porter tried to   
   explain to her three children why she had lost, part of the lesson   
   focussed on the Realpolitik of wealth and elections. “When you have   
   members who are afraid of ten million dollars being spent overnight   
   against them, the will in Washington to do what’s right disappears   
   pretty quickly,” she recalls saying. “This was naked political power   
   designed to influence votes in Washington. And it worked.”   
      
   “And I’m saying you need to come look at this.”   
   Cartoon by Roland High   
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   Porter’s defeat, in fact, was the culmination of a strategy that had   
   begun more than a decade earlier to turn Silicon Valley into the most   
   powerful political operation in the nation. As the tech industry has   
   become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of   
   specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the   
   idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon   
   Valley how to play the game of politics. Their aim is to help tech   
   leaders become as powerful in Washington, D.C., and in state   
   legislatures as they are on Wall Street. It is likely that in the   
   coming decades these efforts will affect everything from Presidential   
   races to which party controls Congress and how antitrust and artificial   
   intelligence are regulated. Now that the tech industry has quietly   
   become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in American politics,   
   it is wielding that power as previous corporate special interests have:   
   to bully, cajole, and remake the nation as it sees fit.   
      
   Chris Lehane was just shy of thirty years old when he came up with the   
   notion of “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” to explain Republican efforts   
   to undermine Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was such an inspired bit of   
   showmanship that Hillary Clinton adopted it as one of her signature   
   lines. At the time, Lehane was a lawyer in the Clinton White House   
   tasked with defending the Administration from charges of scandal, but   
   he specialized in seizing control of the political conversation,   
   finding colorful ways to put Republicans on defense. Tactics such as   
   declaring that the President of the United States was the victim of a   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)