The rightwing billionaire’s SuperPAC has been using this site to give J.D. Vance millions in campaign help.
On Tuesday night, just after the polls closed in Ohio, Alex Isenstadt of Politico published a story with a fascinating headline: “A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel’s big risk: How J.D. Vance won his primary.” Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, was once a Trump critic, but since leaping into the political arena he’s become one of the ex-president’s biggest fans, earning his endorsement late in the race. But his victory Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Trump and Trumpism is still dominant among Republican voters; it was also a major vindication for rightwing tech VC Thiel, who poured a record $15 million into a SuperPAC called Protect Ohio Values that backed Vance, who was until recently an employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital fund.
Not since the Gilded Age, when Senators were chosen by state legislatures (not the direct popular vote) and railroad and oil barons bought them by the armful, has any single fatcat played such a singular role in elevating a politician. Of course, Vance still has to win the general election this fall against Democratic nominee Tim Ryan, so Thiel doesn’t yet have his own personal senator. Undoubtedly he will pour even more money into this SuperPAC to try to lock in his investment. So one question I have at the moment: Should Medium keep letting him circumvent federal campaign finance law and its own site rules as the election plays out?
As Isenstadt explains in his Politico piece, Vance’s victory was never a given. First, he had to undo the effects of his pre-2016 comments about Trump, who he said he “loathed.” And, unlike several of the other Republicans running who were wealthy enough to finance their own bids, Vance was a first-time candidate with little money and no pre-existing donor base.
He solved the first problem by befriending Donald Trump Jr. and abjectly embracing the worst elements of Trumpism. More than any of the other Republicans running, Vance turned full MAGA, declaring that the 2020 election was stolen and claiming that the people who have been arrested and imprisoned for storming the Capitol January 6th are political prisoners. Vance is comfortable invoking violence as the path to America’s redemption, stating for example, “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
He has also declared that when Trump is re-elected in 2024, he should purge the civil service of non-Trumpers and then ignore any court that tried to stop him. “A lot of what this campaign is about — and a lot of my own thinking about politics is about — is that our institutions are corrupt. We have to replace the people who run them. Some of these institutions we have to destroy.” Vance added, “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” On top of all that, he capped his campaign by bringing Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, two of the GOPs most racist outcasts, to stump with him.
Vance’s second problem was solved by Thiel’s SuperPAC, which stepped in to fill out many of the functions that would normally be core to a campaign operation, doing in-depth opposition research, tons of polling, and developing detailed messaging strategies. But how did Protect Ohio Values do all this work for Vance without violating federal campaign law, which prohibits coordination between SuperPACs and candidate campaigns? Thanks to two recent Supreme Court rulings, Citizens United and McCutcheon, wealthy individuals are allowed to spend as much money as they want to influence a political race as long as they do so independently. There are strict limits on how much an individual can give directly to a candidate, which are meant to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption.
But here’s what Thiel’s SuperPAC did to get around that law. As Isenstadt reported, “Shortly after Vance launched his campaign last summer, Thompson set up a public website where he published a trove of sensitive documents — from thousands of pages of polling data, to memos assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Vance’s opponents, to a 177-page opposition research book detailing all of the areas where Vance’s opponents might attack him. There were suggested lines for Vance to use on the campaign trail, and even guidance on how the candidate could win Trump’s endorsement. All of it was out in the open for the world to see. But it had one intended audience: the Vance campaign.”
That website is right here, on Medium.
To be clear, this isn’t the first time any campaign has used the open web to get around federal election laws prohibiting this kind of de facto coordination. And there’s no chance the FEC is actually going to prosecute Vance or Protect Ohio Values for doing this; the agency is a toothless tiger. But go look at what Protect Ohio Values has posted; a lot of its content literally reads like strategy memos for the Vance campaign. Without all the spade work POV did for Vance that it shared on Medium, he’d probably be another election footnote.
But as far as I can tell, Medium itself is under no obligation to let Protect Ohio Values continue to use its platform. For starters, what POV is doing is what any ordinary person would reasonably see as coordination with Vance’s campaign, which is illegal — though campaign finance lawyers might disagree. Medium’s rules prohibit the use of the site for various kinds of illegal behavior, but they are silent about this particular dodge, which isn’t surprising. But Medium’s posted rules definitely suggest that POV and Vance may be crossing the line. They say, under “threats of violence and incitement,” that “We do not allow content or actions that threaten, encourage, or incite violence against anyone, directly or indirectly. Under “hateful content,” the rules say that “We do not allow posts or accounts that glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups. This includes the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims or misleading statistics to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others. We do not allow calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above.” And under “restricted categories,” the rules also prohibit “the use of pseudoscience, disinformation, or other content that is contrary to public health and safety.”
Finally, the rules extend beyond what a user posts on Medium, stating “We do not allow content or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.”
It seems to me that letting an 2020 election denier who is refining Trumpist attacks on immigrants and warning darkly of the need for violence is well outside the spirit of what Medium aims to be about, “an open platform that exists to share ideas and perspectives” that welcomes “thoughtful and civil discussion from a broad spectrum of viewpoints.” If J.D. Vance or Peter Thiel want to engage in any of those kinds of activities, sure, welcome them. But to enable an election denier and neo-fascist to circumvent federal election law? I don’t think so.