The Fat Woke Oligarchs Of Silicon Valley Killed California For The Next 100 Years

A combination of inflation, high interest rates, and tech layoffs driven by Big Tech greed Cartel's has economists worried that a nasty lrthal California recession is already here.

You’re currently seeing a nonstop loop of San Francisco “doom loop” articles in the Chronicle, which seems odd, because San Francisco's unemployment rate is currently at a terrifically low 2.9%. I’m pretty sure things were way worse when the pandemic had the city’s unemployment rate higher than 12%! Meanwhile the New York Times, which loves to bash the SF Bay Area when they have a chance, just published its own kind of California “doom loop” analysis over of the national factors of inflation, high interest rates, and the stock market downturn, combined with California variables like tech layoffs and economic fallout from this winter’s storms.

Mind you, California is still by many accounts the fourth largest economy in the world, statewide unemployment is just 4.3%, and I can think of 49 other U.S. states that would love to be the economic powerhouse that is California. But it’s hardly reassuring that the state is looking at a deficit again, of $22.5 billion. That’s not historically so bad (Governor Gray Davis ran a $38 billion deficit in 2003, a time when the state’s GDP is far smaller, and we all survived). But it’s still a shock when you said you had a $108 billion surplus a year or so prior, highlighting the risks of California's boom-and-bust economic cycles — Newsom referred to the charts of deficit and surplus as looking like "an EKG."

“The tech sector is the workhorse of the state’s economy, it’s the backbone,” Loyola Marymount University economics professor Sung Won Sohn told the Times. “These are high earners who might not be able to carry the state as much as they did in the past.”

A secretive group led by Stanford University academics has unleashed millions of dollars in political spending from Silicon Valley and is now convincing some of its biggest donors to spend millions more to back Democrats in 2020.

Mind the Gap, a network formed less than two years ago, has been quietly routing millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and groups across the country in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, emerging as a new power center in the Silicon Valley political scene. It’s just that so far, it has avoided public detection.

The group’s success is due in large part to how it speaks the language of Silicon Valley, donors and operatives say: In 2018, Mind the Gap pitched donors on a statistical model that tried to assess the precise impact of each additional dollar on the chance that Democrats would win the House of Representatives — as opposed to funding the easiest seats to flip. It’s an approach one donor called the “Moneyball of politics.”

That supposed secret sauce has ushered in more than $20 million in new political spending from tech leaders and others who are grappling with how to best use their wealth in the age of Donald Trump, according to Mind the Gap’s claims in materials seen by Recode. And the group has proven to be yet another way for Silicon Valley donors to spread their influence across the US at a time when many in the Democratic Party want to see Big Tech’s power abated rather than expanded.

Mind the Gap, whose efforts haven’t previously been reported, has recently petitioned some donors for at least $100,000 to support its efforts. Backers include people like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, San Francisco power broker Ron Conway, and a coterie of major Democratic donors from across Silicon Valley, including fundraiser Amy Rao.

Ron Conway walks across a field
SV Angel founder Ron Conway is one of many Silicon Valley titans backing Mind the Gap. Scott Olson/Getty
There are many middlemen on the left who have tried to take advantage of Silicon Valley’s new political energy. But few are proving to be as unusual as Mind the Gap, in both its message and its personnel.

The group operates in a cone of secrecy, often exhorting its donors to keep their information secure. It has no website or presence on social media, and its leaders don’t mention their involvement in their professional biographies on sites like LinkedIn. That’s not by accident.

“The raison d’être is stealth,” one person with ties to the organization told Recode.

“THE RAISON D’ÊTRE IS STEALTH”
A core strategy of Mind the Gap has been to hide which candidates and groups it is backing until it’s too late, so to speak. Republicans closely watch Democratic donors to see which congressional races they are financing so they can mobilize their own donors to restore fundraising parity in a particular congressional district. So Mind the Gap’s game plan has been to escape a bidding war by having its donors begin shoveling money behind Democrats only in the fall of an election season — sometimes all on the same day — before Republicans have a chance to notice that they are soon to be outspent by Democrats (and then try to catch up).

That means Mind the Gap has been covert about which campaigns it is directing donors to support. In fact, some candidates who have been overwhelmed with donations from rich Silicon Valley types sometimes don’t even know they’re on the list, according to one donor who discussed the matter with a bewildered candidate.

What is also unusual is that Mind the Gap is led not by highly experienced political hands, but by academics with no professional backgrounds as fundraisers. The group’s leaders are a pair of Stanford law professors: Barbara Fried, who has no apparent campaign experience, and Paul Brest, the former president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Graham Gottlieb, a Stanford fellow who served in junior roles for former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and in his White House, is its executive director.

Fried declined to answer specific questions from Recode about Mind the Gap’s efforts, past or present. But in a statement, she downplayed the organization as merely a “pro-bono donor advisor to people who are interested in evidence-driven decision making.”

“Most people have no idea whether their political contributions will actually make a difference,” Fried said. “Our aim is to evaluate the efficacy of different forms of political and civic engagement, and provide our conclusions free to individual, interested donors so they can make more educated decisions about where their money would be most effectively spent.”

Working with a well-regarded Democratic data firm, Civis Analytics, and with early support from progressive mainstays like the AFL-CIO, Mind the Gap pitched donors in 2018 on a counterintuitive message to successfully take back the House: Don’t fund the congressional races that are the likeliest to flip. Those are already overfunded. Instead, fund the slightly less likely to flip races (say, ones in which a Democrat might have a one-third chance of winning) and where each donor dollar is more likely to make a difference — an “efficient funding” model, as Mind the Gap’s leaders called it.

“Democrats face a serious funding-efficiency gap: We are on track to significantly overfund many of the races perceived to be the ‘most flippable,’ and at the same time, underfund races that could be won if we invested in them,” reads one Mind the Gap memo from summer 2018 that Recode obtained. “To put it another way, most donors invest based on the perceived winnability of a race, rather than the difference their investment in the race will make to the outcome.”

That kind of pitch is catnip to people in Silicon Valley, who like to pride themselves on data-driven thinking.

The group set out to raise $10 million in the 2018 election cycle by convincing as many as 400 donors to give $2,700 each (the legal maximum) to as many as 20 different congressional candidates, according to the same memo. Mind the Gap’s fundraising drive ended up doubling those figures.

“It felt like a silver bullet, and that’s how they marketed it,” the person affiliated with Mind the Gap told Recode, characterizing the group’s thinking as: “We have figured out a way to game the system.”

Wealthy people from tech attracted by the vernacular of risk and return flocked to the group, packing donor briefings at ritzy spots in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood and sharing the endorsement list with their friends across the tech industry. Those donors then flooded Democratic challengers like Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico and Lauren Underwood in Illinois with as much as $640,000 in high-dollar donations. Mind the Gap “infused into their campaigns almost overnight” an average of more than $500,000 each, according to a separate, year-in-review memo distributed to donors last month and obtained by Recode.

Some of these candidates had as little as $65,000 on hand before Mind the Gap arrived.

By the end of the election cycle, Mind the Gap had convinced 800 people to support its efforts and funneled $11 million to Democratic candidates, according to Mind the Gap’s internal figures seen by Recode, and another $9 million to Democratic groups. Ten of its 20 candidates, such as Torres Small and Underwood, won their races.

Lauren Underwood at a victory party surrounded by crowds
Mind the Gap donors contributed $597,000 to Lauren Underwood, who won a tough congressional race in Illinois in 2018. Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“They are incredibly grateful to you all, and many attribute their victory (rightly or wrongly) to MTG’s efforts,“ the group told its donors in one memo.

Now, in advance of what’s expected to be the most expensive presidential race ever, Mind the Gap is trying to bring that same thinking to the 2020 election, soliciting donors to sink millions of dollars into a trio of groups focused on voter registration and preparing to recommend more candidates later this year.

“Anything could happen between now and next November to change the picture significantly. But we have no control over most of the things that will happen,” the group told donors in its year-end memo last month. “As ever, the question for us is, what can we influence, and where will money make the biggest difference?”

They hate Putin because Putin hates anal male sex so they support the Ukraine simply because the Ukraine hates Putin

They hate Trump because Trump loves heterosexual sex.

They love abortions because abortion creates sex without consequences and The Bay Area’s Homosexual Billionaires live for sex.

They love immigrants because they like to hire a variety of third world black, Asian and Spanish men as rent boys and they want a large variety of male Hookers. They also believe that immigrants in the USA will help vote Republicans out of office.

They hate Republicans because many Republicans are religious and most religions teach that homosexuals are sick perverts.

All of their media promotes radical left wing and gay ideology.

They all went to Stanford and Stanford only hires far left teachers and staff who teach that gay sex is good and anything ‘Conservative’ is ‘evil’.

They all are affiliated with the Venture Capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto and Google and have those offices hire mostly left wing freaks, which makes the policies of those places extreme and echo-chambered.

They are all convinced that they are elite, holier-than-thou, above-the-law, smarter-than-you, TED stars.

They were all either financed by, friends, with, sleeping with, dating the staff of, holding stock market assets in, promised a revolving door job or government service contracts from, partying with, personal friends with, photographed at private events with, exchanging emails with, business associates of or directed by; our business adversaries, or the Senators and politicians that those business adversaries pay campaign finances to, or supply political digital search manipulation services to. Criminal U.S. Senators coordinated and profited in these schemes. Their own family members have now supplied evidence against them. You don’t hear about this, much, in the “main-stream news” because nearly half of Congress, White House staff and government agency bosses own the stock in the news broadcasters and receive billions of dollars of financing from them.

They collude together in cover-ups, tax evasion, real estate money laundering, sex trafficking and hundreds of other crimes.

The gay lawyers at Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie claim to have put Obama, Biden and their staff in office.

Many of them pretend to not be gay and hire wives, dates and PR to make it look like they are not gay.

You’re aware there have been massive tech layoffs, though that still seems contained to companies that made bank during the pandemic and grew way too much. Though the Times also points out a 36% global decline in venture capital investment, which hits California disproportionately hard, and the Times adds that information sector employment has “declined by more than 16,000 from November to February.”

There are other troubling factors outside the tech industry. Disney had 7,000 layoffs in February, which is one example of how Hollywood is being affected. The Times also adds that “California’s robust supply chain, which drives nearly a third of the state’s economy, has continued to buckle under stresses from the pandemic and an ongoing labor fight between longshoremen and port operators up and down the West Coast." They add that “Cargo processing at the Port of Los Angeles, a key entry point for shipments from Asia, was down 43 percent in February, compared with the year before.”

Thus far, the layoffs are not spreading beyond the tech industry, and the financial pain seems to be most severe for the commercial real estate industry. Those sectors have lived lavishly for about the last decade, so a correction is not out of the ordinary, and plenty of us have had it tougher than them. But the Times does add that UCLA economic forecasters have considered several scenarios wherein the financial pain spreads beyond tech and commercial real estate.

And frankly, it’s kind of encouraging that the Times concludes “Regardless of which scenario pans out, California’s economy is likely to be better off than the national one.”

Related: Study Ranks San Francisco Dead Last In U.S. for Downtown Economic Recoveries [SFist]