Grifters Gonna Grift

Depressing.

Reading those stories now brought me to a depressing realization: The people who said they were going to beat Donald Trump in 2020 by emulating his supposedly highly sophisticated digital targeting operation have instead emulated Trump by turning their campaigns into a lucrative grift for a small group of well connected party insiders. And, because this is the Democrats we are talking about, they did so by burning enormous sums of money that could have done untold good, politically and strategically, had they been used for just about anything else.

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So where is that money going, exactly? Acronym’s principal is a political operative named Tara McGowan, who had worked for Priorities USA, the main super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She is also the owner (and apparently the sole employee) of Lockwood Strategies, a for-profit “digital consulting” company that, as it happens, received $1 million from Acronym in the fall of 2018. In other words, almost immediately after she failed to win the most important election she had ever worked on, McGowan managed to convince some of the wealthiest liberals in the country to shower her with money to produce ineffective trash. This is called “disruption,” and it now powers the American economy.