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Recently, a movement has come along with the entire goal of breaking up big-tech. While many of my fellow Liberty Hawk writers have talked about this movement in the form of people like Senator Josh Hawley on the right and Elizabeth Warren on the left, I feel like this rhetoric has been inefficient.
While we might deride them on policy, they will respond that they are “populists,” and “for the working man.” As such, it only makes sense to criticize them on this ground just as much as on the basis of policy.
Let’s start with Senator Josh Hawley. As I’ve previously documented on Medium, Josh Hawley’s 2018 Senate Campaign got around 66% of their funding from large individual contributions. This includes getting just under $300,000 from the Club for Growth, a right-libertarian think tank that resisted Donald Trump during the early days of the 2016 Presidential Election. In fact, they supported Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the same former presidential candidates that many populists deride Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, for endorsing.
The Club for Growth was founded by four millionaires named Harlan Crow, Stephen Moore, Thomas Rhodes, and Richard Gilder.
Another famous right-wing populist is Fox News host Tucker Carlson. His father, Dick Carlson, was a wealthy journalist who worked for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also spent five years as the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker’s parents sent him to an elite private school in the suburbs. But I promise you, his is the struggle of the working man. (Also, his stepmother runs the Swanson frozen foods empire. Just thought you should know that.)
Hey, here are some quotes from Carlson:
“I’m an out-of-the-closest elitist. I don’t run around pretending to be a man of the people. I’m absolutely not a man of the people at all.”
“Well, I’m, like, extraordinarily loaded just from, like, money I, you know, inherited.”
“One thing you learn when you grow up in a castle and look out across the moat every day at the hungry peasants is you don’t want to stoke envy among the proletariat.”
Hey, anyone remember those Bubba The Love Sponge clips? I can promise you the majority of people reading this heard twice as much about Tucker insulting some CNN woman than about when he admitted he was a fraud.
Of course, the problem is just as endemic, if not more so, over on the left.
Elizabeth Warren (the woman who lied about being Native American for government money) is the most obvious example. One of her biggest funders back in 2018 was Emily’s List, which was founded by noted wealthy millionaire Ellen Malcolm. Her campaign also got $9,000 from lobbyists and almost $160,000 from labor unions, the lobby Democrats always love. (Even Michael Moore admits that labor unions are no longer for the workers)
Bernie Sanders got tons of money for his 2016 Presidential Campaign from Microsoft. This is the company we all know Bill Gates founded, the one Bernie currently wants to take all the wealth from. He also has gotten $108,000 from them this election cycle. And he has $130,000 from Amazon, $88,000 from Apple, and over $100,000 from the US military (which I thought he raged against).
It seems like the people who claim not to be bought and sold are the most likely to be bought and sold . Maybe it’s just projection, maybe it’s an attempt to deflect, but we should still oppose it and call it out whenever possible.
Ephrom Josine is a libertarian political blogger/commentator, and a frequent contributor to The Liberty Hawk. You can find him on Twitter @EphromJosine1, writing near-daily on Medium @ephromjosine or weekly on Freedom First Blog.
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