Accountable Tech appears to exist at the bottom layer of an opaque funding architecture glutted with billions in cash. According to an investigation by a Montana newspaper, which was curious as to what this strange group was doing spending millions of dollars in favor of marijuana legalization in a distant and sparsely populated state, the North Fund’s office in D.C. is an empty Potemkin headquarters managed by a pay-by-the-month, address-for-hire service—this despite raking in some $66.3 million in funding in 2020.
The co-founder and public face of Accountable Tech is Jesse Lehrich, who was the foreign policy spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s defeated 2016 presidential campaign. In July of 2017, Lehrich acknowledged to Business Insider that while working for Clinton, he had “sound[ed] the alarm on these Kremlin connections” tying Moscow to the former secretary of state’s Republican opponent, “and we knew more shoes would drop.” In reality, the alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia that Lehrich peddled to the media turned out to either be trivial or false.
Since Lehrich’s new organization became operational in mid-2020, a majority of the emails it has sent out have been aimed at one company in particular, according to the Archive of Political Emails—Facebook, with subject lines like “26% stock drop for Facebook’s birthday,” and “Congress must investigate Facebook.” Evidently, the reported $400 million that Mark Zuckerberg shelled out to Democratic Party-supported election-related causes, like targeted get-out-the-vote “voter education” and “fair balloting,” was not enough to erase the company’s refusal to kick Trump off the site during the election—which in turn recalled the company’s original sin of allowing itself to be used as a conduit by Vladimir Putin, a being of godlike power, when he mesmerized helpless and stupid American voters into electing Trump in 2016. Whatever happened, these folks argue, Trumpian fascism was clearly the direct result of an unpoliced Facebook, and it is up to someone, preferably Democratic officeholders themselves, to do the policing now.
UltraViolet, the third member of the Let’s Break Elon’s Windows gang, is funded through groups like the American Federation of Teachers and the Libra Foundation, the donor organization for a billionaire member of the left-wing Pritzker family. UltraViolet is unique in the staid world of NGOs for sharing a name with an Andy Warhol superstar (given name: Isabelle Collin Dufresne). The group was #MeToo before #MeToo existed, getting the sneaker company Reebok to drop the rapper Rick Ross as a pitchman in 2013 over his purported support of “rape culture,” and lobbying the next year for TBS to cancel CeeLo Green’s show over his alleged misogyny.
But the foundation does more than target successful Black musicians. The height of the hallucinatory Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault uproar saw UltraViolet-trained activists bracing then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in a Capitol Hill elevator, manufacturing an instantly viral moment amid one of the most unhinged political episodes of the entire Trump era. In fact, the group had trained over 300 volunteers to walk the halls of the Senate office buildings and confront whatever lawmakers they came across, a tactic the group then openly bragged about. UltraViolet is of course founded and led by someone with a career in professional Democratic politics, in this case by the former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ nonprofit arm, Shaunna Thomas.
The anti-Musk triad forms a kind of unity: One leg is well-known and established, another is a recent creation of the party’s dark-money infrastructure, and the third practices a watered-down, establishment-blessed variation on direct action, specializing in guerilla tantruming tactics to get business and lawmakers to go along with whatever it is they want. They are all, in some sense, effective at what they do. Media Matters and UltraViolet have launched campaigns that got people fired and starved Fox News of corporate advertising money; Accountable Tech helped amplify Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s well-plotted campaign against her former employer.
What really unites these organizations isn’t an ideology or a common donor list or a shared agenda or the prominent place of the Democratic Party in the resumes of their leadership. What binds them is a project to expand the partisan battleground until nothing and no one is exempt from the end-times struggle they might sincerely believe themselves to be waging—not Elon Musk, not Coca-Cola, not Rick Ross. And not you, either.
