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 Ja�n

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
shadowy conservative cabal were so effective that the Times later
declared Lehane to be the modern-day �master of the political dark
arts.�

After serving in the White House, Lehane joined Al Gore�s Presidential
campaign, as press secretary, and after Gore�s defeat he set up shop in
San Francisco. Despite the size and the electoral significance of
California, many campaign operatives viewed the state as a political
backwater, because it was so far away from Washington. But Lehane, who
had worked on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, was convinced that
Silicon Valley was the future, and he quickly built a business
providing his dark arts to wealthy Californians. When trial lawyers
wanted to increase the state�s caps on medical-malpractice jury awards,
they brought in Lehane, who helped send voters flyers that looked like
cadaver toe tags, and produced ads implying that doctors might be
performing surgery while drunk. A few years later, when a prominent
environmentalist hired Lehane to campaign against the Keystone XL
Pipeline, he sent activists into press conferences carrying vials of
sludge from an oil spill; the sludge was so noxious that reporters fled
the room. Then he hired one of the Navy SEALs who had helped kill Osama
bin Laden to talk to journalists and explain that if the pipeline were
approved a terrorist attack could flood Nebraska with one of the
largest oil spills in American history. Lehane explained to a reporter
his theory of civil discourse: �Everyone has a game plan until you
punch them in the mouth. So let�s punch them in the mouth.�

Video From The New Yorker

But Lehane�s efforts generally failed to impress the tech industry. For
decades, Silicon Valley firms had considered themselves mostly detached
from electoral politics. As one senior tech executive explained to me,
until about the mid-twenty-tens, �if you were a V.C. or C.E.O. you
might hire lobbyists to talk to politicians, or gossip with you, but,
beyond that, most of the Valley thought politics was stupid.� Within a
decade of Lehane�s move West, however, a new kind of tech company was
emerging: so-called sharing-economy firms such as Uber, Airbnb, and
TaskRabbit. These companies were �disrupting� long-established sectors,
including transportation, hospitality, and contract labor. Politicians
had long considered it their prerogative to regulate these sectors,
and, as some of the startups� valuations grew into the billions,
politicians began making demands on them as well. They felt affronted
by companies like Uber that were refusing to abide by even modest
regulations. Other companies tried a more conciliatory approach, but
quickly found themselves mired in local political infighting and
municipal bureaucracies. In any case, �not understanding politics
became an existential risk,� another senior tech executive said. �There
was a general realization that we had to get involved in politics,
whether we wanted to or not.�