‘For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) The cognitive deficits of Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, have been on full display during the 2020 election season, and so have his technological deficits.
Whereas President Donald Trump has mastered social media and the art of influencing online news cycles, Biden has appeared dazed and confused—if he’s appeared at all.
But progressive Silicon Valley tech billionaires are rapidly stepping up on Biden’s behalf.
Tech gurus like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz—even Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs—have funded Democratic efforts to oust Republicans and destroy President Trump.
Now, they’re ramping up their deep-pocketed activism, not only to fund the Biden campaign but to wield their centralized power over online information through undisclosed means and murky political start-ups.
According to the far-left website Vox, Silicon Valley elites are spending tens of millions of dollars on sweeping plans to influence the November election.
Funding partisan “news” websites, political-science experiments and a takeover of the Democratic National Committee’s data operations are just some of the billionaires’ election-meddling pursuits that are already underway.
Their efforts are reportedly equal parts loathing of President Trump and exasperation over Biden’s lack of digital competency and awareness.
“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign,” said one Democratic operative involved, “what we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the Democratic mega-donors see themselves as playing catch-up with Republicans rather than building on past success.
In 2016, Schmidt, a prominent Obama-Clinton donor with an estimated net worth of $15 billion, funded a group of top technologists in support of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The effort failed, and many Silicon Valley Democrats, along with some Biden officials, are wary about Schmidt repeating his past mistakes.
This time he’s created an organization called the Democratic Data Exchange to work with the DNC and encourage data-sharing among state parties while improving their digital capabilities.
But all that glitters isn’t gold. Billions of dollars in personal wealth and smug, coastal-tech attitudes aren’t a winning approach with many state-party officials. It’s the same division within the Democratic Party that helped sink Clinton in 2016.
“My problem is when Silicon Valley folks think that they know how to do our jobs better,” Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, told Vox.
“I would never walk into Google or anywhere else and say, ‘Your model sucks,’” she continued. “I don’t second-guess them, and I’m asking them not to second-guess us.”
The Democratic Data Exchange is a rival program to Hoffman’s data-storage operation known as Alloy.
The controversial Hoffman already has invested $18 million in his political startup. The self-described purpose of Alloy is to collect as much data on voters as possible and influence their voting decisions.
In 2018, Hoffman helped conduct a nefarious election effort in Alabama during a special Senate election to replace then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
After Democratic Sen. Doug Jones narrowly won, it was discovered that Hoffman funded a secret group that used social media “disinformation” tactics similar to those allegedly made by Russian operatives during the 2016 election.
Hoffman later apologized for his involvement, though he appears anything but remorseful.
Hoffman is now looking to take his proclivities for “fake news” to a new level. His aides have leaked plans for a series of partisan news websites that admittedly “masquerade as journalism.”
Along with allied progressive donors, Hoffman has put $15 million into a group called MotivAI, a digital advertising firm that creates what many consider the same type of misinformation he pushed in the 2018 midterms.
Hoffman has also partnered with Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow to fund another secretive propaganda group called Acronym.
For all the feigned outrage at conservative social-media disinformation, which ostensibly was the basis for recent anti-Trump censorship policies, Silicon Valley progressives are now openly championing election propaganda.
“For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds,” said Tara McGowan, founder of Acronym.
“We can’t sit by another cycle and watch a one-sided battle play out online,” she said.