Fairshake

And that just got me to remembering regarding digital assets and what you just talked about as well, that I saw a report in something called Punchbowl News, which is updates on legislation and activity there that the crypto industry is putting out a series of ads pushing for the passage of the clarity act which is actually supposed to be from what i can tell supposed to be voted on next week And the reason they reference this is they're going to be having three separate ads, again, according to Punchbowl News.

And this is a 501c4 that's linked to a crypto super hack network that's called Fairshake.

And so there are three spots.

Two of them are what they're calling positive spots about the importance of the Clarity Act in terms of guardrails around cryptocurrency.

Also, just being aware of which interests are being, getting involved in your local elections because a lot of these super PACs have names that are really, really benign, and very intentionally so.

So, you know, you'll watch an ad and at the end it says, "This ad was paid for by Fairshake." And it's like, oh yeah, Fairshake, that sounds nice.

That doesn't imply anything about crypto.

But sure enough, that is the biggest crypto PAC.

And then, you know, encouraging your elected officials to vote against these bills which are, again, written by the crypto industry directly intended to benefit those people.

The same billionaires who have made huge amounts of money off of everyday people through the crypto sector are trying to only bolster that bottom line with these bills that will basically get rid of what minimal consumer protections even exist.

The Fairshake thing really pisses me off because 10 years ago I was working on something called Fairshake in California, and it was an effort funded by NextGen California, which was funded by the billionaire, progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, to push pro-family, pro-worker, pro-environment legislation in California.

And that was our whole thing was the Fairshake plan, and it, we got the name Fairshake from Chris Lahane, who literally took the same damn name 10 years later once he sold his soul to the crypto billionaires and applied it to this horrific evil PAC that's trying to eat our country.

It's also worth remembering that because that August vote, it was supposed to be a July vote, and then it became an August vote, and now it's a September vote, because we keep punting, crypto can't start spending against Democrats.

Because the moment Fairshake chooses a Democrat to topple, that might poke the Senate's chances of reclaiming the chamber, which is becoming more real every day.

If Fairshake appears to be challenging that, Democrats will walk away.

There is no question in my mind, and if it's not Schumer who pulls the plug, it'll be the people at the table who will say, "Hey, you can't be in our way like this." And so ironically, the longer these talks drag on, the weaker crypto will be because airtime is simply being filled up.

You can throw money at the digital ads forever, but that doesn't have the same impact as television ads, and so a lot of major ad markets are being filled up by the campaigns themselves and other interests.

Yeah.

We've also seen some pretty high-profile instances where crypto has tried to make an impact in races and failed.

In Florida, there was a Miami-Dade County commissioner running for Frederica Wilson's old seat in Congress, and Fairshake, one of their affiliates, started running ads with fake Miami Herald headlines that tried to make him look like a MAGA sympathizer to undercut him in the primary to boost one of two other candidates in that race, just trying to weaken his momentum, and they lost.

Ripple Lab co-founder Chris Larson donated $65.7 million.

Coinbase and Ripple Labs each gave $48 million to Fairshake.

DraftKings donated $34.8 million.

Miriam Adelson gave 67.6 million to Super PAC supporting House and Senate Republicans.

One of the articles, which the ad references with a fabricated headline reading, quote, Oliver Gilbert approves $15 million for MAGA donors company, does not even mention Gilbert.

Fairshake's attempt to defeat Democratic opponents by linking them to ICE mirrors their similarly unsuccessful strategy against Illinois Senate candidate Juliana Stratton earlier this year.

Of course, the ads talk about ICE because these PACs know that running ads about crypto would only alienate the voters they're chasing.

They don't care about ICE whatsoever.

Fairshake's Republican arm has dumped more than $7 million behind Kentucky's Republican Senate candidate, Andy Barr, who's been running ads in which he proclaims, I love ICE.

Cheers to ICE.

In the courts, Jong Sang-ho, the CEO of the South Korean Delio cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed in mid-2023, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison after he was found guilty of defrauding its customers.

Even if Democrats are generally better on it than the Republicans who are all lined up behind crypto, it's just not clean enough for the American people to clearly know, "Hey, if you're a crypto billionaire, you're with the Republicans.

But if you're an everyday person that might get screwed over by a crypto scr- scheme, you're with the Democrats." That, we haven't drawn that clean of a line, and it's because, as you pointed out, they have this thing called the Fairshake PAC.

It's a very big PAC.

They're putting a lot of money into elections.