News Brief: The Billionaire-Backed Groups Working to Push Dems Right in 2026 and 2028
Citations Needed | October 13, 2025 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed, and today, Adam, we want to go through a number of the newly sprouted billionaire-backed groups sometimes referred to as ‘movements’ — we can get into that–that have emerged following the devastating Kamala Harris defeat of 2024 to see the rise of a second Trump administration, and apparently, Silicon Valley billionaires are now going to lead the charge, Adam, to save our democracy. And how are they going to do that? They’re going to start new organizations, new think tanks, new PACs, all under the guise of new, quote-unquote, “movements” to push their own agenda and have Democrats win again.
Adam: Yeah. So in the last year, there’s been quite a few centrist projects hatched in the swamps of DC that all kind of have different approaches, but it’s really just a variation on a theme. They’re all funded, of course, by billionaires. We can go into who those are when we drill down the list. But the broad theme is that, in the wake of 2024 after Harris’s loss and Trump’s rise, that again, we sort of are back to this whole, we’re always kind of relitigating 2016 in perpetuity. But should the Democrats be more leftwing populist, or is there another approach? And of course, if I’m Reid Hoffman, if I’m a billionaire, if I’m the Walton Family Foundation, if I’m, name your venture capitalist or hedge-fund manager or real-estate mogul, clearly, leftwing populism is not what I want the direction the party to go into, and whether or not that is good or bad is an academic question. They don’t want higher taxes. They don’t want a party that represents the interests of the working class.
Nima: They don’t want redistributive wealth policies, yeah.
Adam: No, obviously. And they don’t want the Wokes to kind of be too big for their britches. So there is a cottage industry of people, mercenaries in Washington–
Nima: I’d say a mansion industry.
Adam: There’s a mansion industry of people in Washington, political actors, pseudo-intellectuals, mercenary academics, who will come along and tell rich people what they want to hear for a price. Which is to say, the reason why Harris lost–again, you must subvert reality, you must invert reality–was not because she was too centrist, not because she campaigned with Liz Cheney, not because she had sort of gotten rid of some of the more working-class-centric rhetoric and instead focused on, again, this kind of high-minded Liz Cheney approach that is beloved by the MSNBC set and, more importantly, by wealthy donors, in fact, she was too leftwing and she was too leftwing-coded.
And so this primary premise is the premise of the three factions we’re going to talk about today, which are the broader Abundance Movement, which we did an episode on, Episode 223, last summer, Empire Strikes First, where we went over how they’ve crowded out the field to kind of own a narrative post-Harris loss, and maybe even post-Trump. The second we’re going to cover is Majority Democrats PAC, which is another billionaire-backed group meant to get rid of so-called ‘purity politics.’
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: They love this pejorative term.
Nima: Yeah, it’s very Third Way. It’s very reminiscent also of the Democratic Leadership Council of the Clinton years.
Adam: The original neoliberal entryist project. And the third one is Searchlight Institute, which is made up of former John Fetterman, I guess, chiefs of staff and aides run by Chief of Staff Adam Jentleson, who’s kind of made a media brand off punching left and mocking Gaza protesters and belittling, again, anyone he perceives as being woke in this project.
Nima: But have no fear, this is what is going to save our democracy.
Adam: So we’re going to go over these different factions and organizations, who funds them, why they’re funding them, what their broad arguments are, why their arguments are horseshit, and how, for some reason, they keep trying to take credit for Mamdani’s primary victory, which is really funny, because obviously none of these people supported Mamdani. But, as they say, success has a thousand fathers. We will get into that.
Right now, let’s begin with Abundance. We’ve obviously talked about this before in great detail, so we won’t spend too long on it. But suffice to say that the Abundance Movement largely comes out of Silicon Valley, Wall Street organization-funded groups, like the Niskanen Center, Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Emergent Ventures, and increasing the elements of the Koch family network and the American Enterprise Institute, which is obviously a recurring villain on our show.
Henry Burke, who was a guest on Episode 223, Revolving Door, has issued a very good report on who funds the Abundance Movement. Again, there’s a lot of No True Scotsman. You’ll say, Well, that’s not really Abundance. Abundance is this or that. And that may be fine, but on this show, we have a general rule, which is that we are concerned with reality and the way reality actually works, not sort of abstract moral preferences or vague normative claims, but actually who in reality has power. They worked with something called WelcomeFest, which was referred to by the New York Times as, quote, the “CPAC of the Center.” And their headline, quote, “At ‘CPAC of the Center,’ Democratic Moderates Beat Up on the Left.” This was from their gathering last June.
Nima: Everyone is welcome except the Left, but otherwise, their tent is huge.
Adam: Yeah. And so this is, of course, a coalition of people funded by large corporations, funded by banking, Wall Street, funded by Zionist pressure organizations, like AIPAC. And their whole thing is, their argument, their central argument, pretty much all these groups, is that America is just axiomatically and fundamentally center-right, and we have to meet them where they are, and the average voter’s political preferences happen to align with those of Wall Street. It’s one of these accidents. You know, it’s like a total coincidence that the sun and the moon have roughly the same shape to create a solar eclipse. The fact that our moon is so large is actually astronomically — yeah? Well, yeah, they happen to be proportionate to how far they are away from Earth. The moon is roughly 230,000 miles. The sun is 93 million miles. But given the relative size, they just happen to look exactly the same. That’s actually incredibly rare. It just happened to align like that.
Nima: [Chuckles] Right.
Adam: The sort of preferences of Joe Six-Pack that we need to win just happened to align exactly with the preferences of Reid Hoffman and John Arnold and various and sundry of people who may or may not have been on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. And it just so happened to be, that that’s the sort of general pitch they take. And it sounds very savvy, right? It sounds superficially appealing to a certain kind of moron who’s like, Well, you know, we have to meet people where they are, and we can’t be into purity politics.
Nima: Well, right? How do you expect to win when everyone’s against you? And it’s like, Well, that really begs the question.
Adam: Right? And so if I look at the carnage of the Democratic Party as it exists right now, and look at the ascendancy of the sort of failures to beat Trump twice, and the totally feckless uselessness of Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, the obvious solution is that the centrist coalition, such as it is, barely stopped the bleeding for four years during Biden. But of course, he even won on a lot of progressive energy, which we can get into, but mostly has failed. It’s kind of failed miserably to do its primary task, which is to prevent ascendant fascism. And you would say, Well, maybe we need fresh approaches. We need a real, radically different approach.
Now, if I’m rich, okay, if my economically centrist, pro-free trade, you know, again, Biden moderated somewhat, but largely, we would say neoliberal framework has failed to stop Trump, and it sort of tried to co-opt so-called ‘woke politics’ on race and other kind of vectors of oppression to sort of gain progressive credibility while moving right on economics, there’s only one real solution you’re going to pitch to a rich person. Because you can’t go left on economics. So what you got to say is, Oh, actually, we went too left on, quote-unquote, “social issues,” “cultural issues,” and we need to go right on social issues, because the option of going left on economics is simply not an option.
Now, the fact that the most popular politician in this country is very, very left economically, and pretty left socially, is not really registered. He’s kind of considered an anomaly. Of course, that’s Bernie Sanders. So the offer that’s going to be made by these mercenaries to these wealthy donors who want to maintain their control and grip on the party and its policies and its direction is going to be, Why don’t we throw trans people, immigrants, and other various so-called cultural issues, right? A kind of very euphemistic way of putting taking away healthcare from people–
Nima: A genocide in Gaza, for instance.
Adam: Exactly, right. So the genocide is a cultural issue. We’re going to throw them under the bus. And everyone who thinks of this as, you know, they always act like they just cracked the Da Vinci code, right? They kind of have, this camera does this pan zoom into their face, all those sort of numbers around their head.
Nima: Yeah. And then they kind of stand up in the Sam Neill Jurassic Park, taking off the glasses, looking up towards the brachiosaurus called Abundance, the Abundance Agenda. All we have to do is build. Democrats don’t build anymore, and that’s what we need. That’s kind of the framework of the so-called Abundance Agenda. Obviously, its kind of avatars right now are the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, formerly of Vox, and the Atlantic magazine’s Derek Thompson. They published a book together called Abundance last March, March of this year, 2025, and have received, ever since kind of putting this out into the world before and after the publication of the book, fawning coverage across legacy and corporate media. They have many allies who are even not in the so-called ‘liberal’ camp, but in the more conservative camp, because they have built this premise around the idea of building and innovation, and what we need to do is get rid of more red tape. We need to get rid of the regulation that is stifling the innovators, the builders, the creators. And that will lead us back to not only national prosperity, global prominence and dominance, but also it will allow Democrats, if they champion this idea of Abundance, it will bring Democrats back into a power position, as it relates to the workers, right, the working class, that we can have good things, we can show our good works, and that will do the job for Democrats. Now, on its face, you’re like, Sure, but how does that building and that innovation work? And this is all about allowing the wealthy unfettered access to not only the disbursement of their own capital the way they want to, but also being, as I said, much more free of any kind of regulation.
Adam: Yeah, because it’s fundamentally a deregulatory framework, which is, of course, why Silicon Valley loves it. Now, they’ll throw some red meat to lefty claims to so-called state capacity, right? They’ll sort of, Derek Thompson, Well, we need more government spending, and that’s so it’s a leftwing–no, it’s not. They don’t care. And this is a sort of, again, a kind of box-checking exercise. So it’s not the most transparently neoliberal project ever, but one thing that aligns with, the reason why Silicon Valley loves it and supports it and funds it is that, because of rapidly increasing energy demands for the AI bubble, require fast-tracking the building of energy capacity, specifically getting rid of environmental regulations and getting rid of fossil-fuel regulations. And so that’s pretty much a cynical angle, as Henry Burke has noted.
Nima: Not to mention worker safety. But, yeah.
Adam: Worker safety. Name it, right? And so, again, it’s superficially appealing to a specific kind of middlebrow, the guy who sort of buys his books at airports kind of guy. And I get it. It’s sort of so generic, it’s kind of inoffensive. You know, it’s kind of the good things plan.
Nima: Father’s Day Book Club constituency.
Adam: [Laughs] Wow. Okay, now we’re just being elitist. It sort of has this generic appeal, like, We need to build things. Yeah, sounds good. But of course, there’s something a little more sinister going on, and we know that based on, again, the actual manifestation of these big conferences they have who they end up punching, what groups they want to throw under the bus.
Nima: It’s basically like, if your tagline is effectively ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ but for good, then, you know, something else is going on. And also, because of who is backing this and supporting it through conferences, through book tours, through media appearances, it is clear why rich people and, say, kind of elite media circles and elite foundation and nonprofit circles as well, really, really like this, because it does not offend a neoliberal sensibility, right? If there were an actual kind of left politics infused into the Abundance Agenda, it would not be getting the headlines or attention that it gets. And also, I would assume its primary narrators would not be Ezra Klein, who thinks that Charlie Kirk does politics the right way, or Derek Thompson of the Atlantic.
Adam: Yeah, usually leftwing sort of movements or progressive movements or populist movements don’t emerge from the New York Times and the Atlantic, historically. You know, not to I don’t want to pre-judge or oversimplify. So the next faction, which is more about kind of the PAC world and fundraising for Democrats, specifically in the Senate, but it’s also related to the House as well, is something called Majority Democrats, which got its kind of obligatory puff piece in the New York Times this summer. “These Younger Democrats Are Sick of Their Party’s Status Quo.”
So, again, all conservative movements and factions, astroturf movements, necessarily, by definition, must orient themselves as rebellious, taking on some stagnant status quo. Right? You can’t just support deregulation because you saw, rich people, you have to support it because there’s some sort of perceived pro-union stifling hierarchy, or pro-woke hierarchy, right? And every one of these organizations, when they do their little launch, they do their little soft launch. They all do their soft launch in the New York Times, naturally, it kind of writes up these puffy pieces with like one ‘To be sure’ paragraph that’s somewhat critical. And they all have to orient themselves as taking on the power structure. But of course, they are the power structure.
And one way you know you’re getting your wallet picked from the wallet inspector is any time you see this kind of Pepsi Generation marketing discourse that talks about how we need more young people, and you’re like,
Okay, well, young people with what politics?
Oh, don’t worry about that. That’s not important. You just need young people.
Okay, well, you just want a bunch of Pete Buttigieg clones, because that sort of sounds fresh and original, and that’s basically what Majority PAC is. The New York Times would write, quote,
“Majority Democrats, a new group of elected officials from all levels of government, has outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party,” unquote. Now, the only political orthodoxy that’s mentioned here is the selling out of trans people and immigrants. So that’s sort of what they mean by the wokeness, right?
Nima: Right. Exactly. The wokeness, right, that apparently a political orthodoxy, according to the New York Times and Majority Democrats in their own kind of branding and talking points, is that the orthodoxy of the day that needs to be broken and remade for the Democrats to be more successful in elections is being less woke. That now that is seen as so standard thinking that trans people deserve rights and equality, and that immigrants are humans and that genocide is bad, these are now stated to be, claimed to be, the orthodoxies that have sunken the Democratic Party, and those need to be taken back, focus-grouped, so that Majority Democrats, the young elected officials of the party–
Adam: Both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were framed as young and fresh and taking on a stodgy orthodoxy.
Nima: That’s right. They can remake the party in their image, which is an image that does not care about a lot of people that make up the base of the Democratic Party.
Adam: This is why generations discourse is a siren song for the most part, because it is. You can sort of plug and play any neoliberal striver into your formula and say, Look, he’s young and scrappy. And okay, well, what is, what are their politics? And then the Times would go on to note, well, it’s very light on specifics. Quote, “Majority Democrats has yet to issue policy prescriptions.”
Nima: [Chuckles]
Adam: Okay, well, but the group, however, was embracing the advice and was largely created by who the New York Times describes as, quote, “Seth London, an adviser to major Democratic donors,” unquote. So that’s a rather incomplete biography, because he is not just an adviser to Democratic donors. Seth London is himself a multimillionaire venture capitalist, but we are told his access to donors is a mark of seriousness, rather than an explicit conflict of interest. Because if he’s a multimillionaire who’s an avatar for billionaires, clearly their approach to, quote-unquote, “winning back working-class voters,” unquote, is going to just be dialing up the racism meter, because they’re not going to support leftwing populist policies as they never do. They’ll sort of gesture to being open to it, but of course, they’re not going to. And as the New York Times spells out in paragraph 19, quote,
In some ways, the group’s structure resembles that of the Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.
But while many of the officials involved in Majority Democrats similarly come from the center-left, organizers insist there is no ideological litmus test to join.
Unquote. Well, if you look at the list of people who’ve actually joined Majority PAC, you’ll be surprised to learn they are all very pro-corporate funded and, of course, all backed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel donors.
Nima: But that is deemed to be kind of baked in, right? That does not trigger the ideological litmus test because they’re already kind of inside, right? They already agree. That kind of thing where you say, No ideological litmus test, synonymous with, We’re not doing purity politics, really just means, We can welcome people who are racist. We can welcome people who want to shut down the border, because, you know what? We have to meet people where they are, and we have to hear from all sides. And then you’re like, What if that side is opposed to slaughtering thousands of people in an open air prison? What if all sides also includes–Oh, right, oh, shit.
Adam: No, see, that’s an ideological litmus test. See, it’s purity politics when you do it. And so let’s move on to the third and final faction here, which is a new think tank called Searchlight Institute, founded by a bunch of ex-John Fetterman aides, who never mentioned that they work for John Fetterman. They seem pretty clearly embarrassed by it, so they mentioned how they used to work for Harry Reid. In fact, Searchlight Institute is named after Searchlight, Nevada, where Harry Reid was born. And so their general theory, you’ll be surprised to learn, is that the party has gone too woke, that it’s sort of embraced their primary villain for why Harris lost was an ACLU form she filled out in 2019 saying she supported healthcare for trans people incarcerated, incarcerated trans people, which they say fueled perceptions of being far left.
And when they’re criticized, when I asked them for their donors, they just shared with me a link saying that 37% of voters thought Harris was too liberal, compared to 25% who thought Trump was too conservative. This is their kind of go-to origin story evidence. But of course, in 2012, 34% of voters thought Obama was too liberal, but he still won. Because these concepts don’t really mean much. They’re just something you sort of show as an outcome-based piece of evidence that the party’s gone too woke. There is actually basically no empirical evidence that that is sort of why people vote, that they kind of only vote because someone’s perceived to have this label that doesn’t really make any sense, but they need this origin story that the reason why Democrats lose is because they’ve been co-opted by what they call, what Jentleson calls, the so-called “groups.”
So we’ll skip the bullshit and get to the rub here, and what really matters when the New York Times casually mentions on paragraph six, quote, “The organization is subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor,” unquote.
I messaged both Adam and several of his associates on Twitter, and then I sent to their web form asking them if they can list the other billionaires on this so-called roster of billionaires, because I assume there’s more than two, because the New York Times heavily implies there are more than two, or at least, I guess it actually says there are more than two. So I’m kind of curious, is it Reid Hoffman? Is it the usual suspects? And it probably is. They have not gotten back to my repeated message requests. I’m going to keep asking them on Twitter until I get an answer, and they basically spend all day on social media talking about how the Americans are fundamentally conservative and Democrats have to go rightwing, and the groups, the sort of groups, are viewed as unduly influential.
Now, one of the funny things is that Jentleson, much like David Shor, who’s in the same milieu, and he’s a pollster, they keep trying to take credit for Mamdani’s win, which is really funny.
Nima: Yeah, this is a funny little pivot where they know that actually the, I’d say, risingest star of the Democratic Party is actually New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who has somehow, Adam, been able to maintain his popularity while also not completely selling out all of his left politics.
Adam: Well, so I want to read a section from the New York Times puff piece on Searchlight. They wrote, quote,
Since Ms. Harris’s loss, many in the party have adopted a more economic-focused message while avoiding social issues. Some prominent Democrats, like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, have backtracked on prior support for transgender rights and open immigration policy. The most prominent liberal candidate to capture the party’s imagination this year, Zohran Mamdani, decisively won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York with an intense focus on the affordability of housing, groceries and child care.
Unquote. Now one may read that and think that Mamdani deprioritized or somehow changed his positions on social issues, since it comes right after a claim of why they should do that, and someone else who did that. But he, of course, did not. Mamdani was openly combative with ICE during the campaign. He repeatedly pledged to defend trans New Yorkers. Of course, he threw a fundraising rally with Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia Gaza protester targeted by Trump, and he promised repeatedly to defend abortion and defend democracy from Trump. He did all the things that Shor and Jentleson say are devastatingly bad. Now you could say, Well, that’s New York. It’s a very leftwing city. Which, again, is not entirely true, but also, okay, but you can’t use them as an example then.
Nima: There are also more conservative Republicans in New York City than there are in, like, entire states in the West.
Adam: It also promotes this dichotomy that you either need to focus on economic issues or sell out these so-called cultural issues, and Mamdani’s candidacy literally proved the opposite. You can focus aggressively on economic populism and alleviating broad-based economic hardship–
Nima: It’s a walk-and-chew-gum argument that, like these new think tanks, do not believe in.
Adam: Which is, by the way, a carbon copy of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, which balanced those two things, I think, quite well. Again, for all my criticisms of Bernie Sanders, he didn’t sell out his economic populism, but he did have what we would broadly consider to be, quote-unquote, “woke” “cultural issues.” And it didn’t really matter much. Nobody really cared, because people really do, people who would be offended by that are drawn in by by economic populism, more importantly, a perception that you’re credible on economic populism, that you’re not in the pocket of big donors, which is something working heavily in Mamdani’s favor in New York City, in addition to his support for ending the genocide in Gaza, which was incredibly popular in New York for fairly obvious reasons.
But this kind of sleight of hand, this idea that just focusing on affordability must come at the expense of trans people or immigrants or other sort of perceived woke causes–again, they’re sort of un-person, they’re not important–has no empirical basis at all. There’s zero empirical basis to support this claim. It is just dogma. It is just something they assert. Because, again, it’s exactly what rich donors want to hear. Because the alternative, which is, We’re going to maintain this sort of, quote-unquote, “cultural issue” status quo, but we’re going to go hard left in economics, is simply not an option, it is not something that’s available.
Because you’re not going to get $10 million like Searchlight did to employ seven people, and they want to create a Shark Tank for policy where people come to them and pitch policies. Because, again, they like to obsess over this idea of policy minutia, because they have to sort of look busy. Because if you’re not really openly supporting a kind of ideological project to make the world better, you sort of delve into this kind of wonkish fetishism, because you got to look busy. You got to do something, right? There has to be some moral claim to why you exist as an organization.
Nima: So now we’re going to do a game show for good ideas, right? That’s how they’re going to spend their time. And then it kind of boosts this idea of, There are good ideas everywhere. And we just, you know, we just have to, like meritocracy, this thing to the foreground, and that is going to be the new face of the Democratic Party. And that way we can say that, you know, Look, we vetted all these ideas, but these are the really popular ones. These are the ones that are really actionable. These are the ones that are realistic. And that allows them to completely ignore and kind of jettison any kind of support for fundamentally progressive, let alone left, social issues, which, as we’ve seen, and as you’ve said, Adam, poll, very, very well, but we’re not supposed to know that.
And also the donors and the backers for these new organizations, these new political action committees, these new think tanks, they’re not in favor of canceling student debt. They’re not in favor of reducing police budgets and moving toward more kind of mental health models and community care and mutual aid models. They don’t want that, because they also have real-estate interests in mind, and so law and order is very important to them in order to, like, sell their properties.
So all of these things are clearly in conflict and clearly create an ideological undergirding to all of these new organizations and these new think tanks. Yet we are told time and again, not only by them and their own talking points and one-pagers, but also repeated through their media puff pieces that they are the ones that are not being ideological. They are the ones that want to open the conversation. They are the ones who have this big tent so that it makes the, quote-unquote, “wokes” seem like they are the ones that are close-minded and oppressive in our politics.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, polls show 60 to 70, depending on the poll, percent of Americans want to curb aid or stop it altogether, aid to Israel. 45% of the American public, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, compared to only 31% who disagree. About four in 10 of American Jewish voters believe the same, so roughly the same amount. But again, we talked about selective popularism. But for some reason, the popularity of cutting off Israel and ending the genocide in Gaza never comes up in these kind of popularist conversations, because that offends a handful of donors who make this their central issue. Contra the opinions of the vast majority of Democrats, contra the opinions of the majority of Jewish Democrats. It doesn’t really matter.
So this popularism is just a skeleton key you can use to open any door you want, whenever you want to, and is not an actual consistent ideology. Because if it was again, we would support Medicare for All. We would support universal childcare. These would be the issues central to Majority PAC and these other groups, but they’re not, so what do we get? We get neoliberal tweaks, a bunch of eggheads from George Mason sitting at a desk, what, pitching fucking policy? So, I mean, it’s bullshit.
Not every leftwing position is popular. I’ll be the first person to admit that. There are plenty of leftwing positions that aren’t popular, but the issue is, we never even get the ones that are popular, because popularity has got nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with what policies are promoted and what policies rise to the top, what issues rise to the top. It has to do with the preferences of donors.
And so we have to run through another, another year of this where we’re supposed to act like these are not people who have an ideological agenda or have a conflict of interest or have class interest, but they’re just deeply concerned donors who really want to beat Republicans, and they just reluctantly and with a heavy heart, must throw immigrants under the bus. We’re so sorry. We would love to support trans healthcare, but we just, sorry. We’ve got to dehumanize you and embrace every rightwing premise, because we have to win such-and-such election. It’s like, no, they just, that’s what they believe. People are funding things they believe. It’s an ideological project that is concerned primarily with ideological production and reproduction. That is why they exist. It is not some reluctant, heavy-hearted, savvy pragmatist, because, again, if it was, we would be pairing these alleged unpopular cultural tradeoffs with very leftwing solutions. But weirdly, we don’t, and we’re not going to, and Searchlight will never propose these.
They’ll do a kind of like David Shor half-measure of, you know, I think during the campaign, he pushed Harris to support some token tax for housing or mortgage. It’s all kind of very exotic. It’s not very robust. It’s not very genuinely populist or universalist. But that’s kind of just buying time. That’s not like a thing that is genuinely animating the party. And of course, it’s not about building credibility by bringing in politicians who have credibility on these issues. And so we’re just going to get more and more of this, because the people who control and fund the party and control its think tanks and control its policy and fund its major players and its leaders don’t want to lose power. It doesn’t matter how many times they lose to Trump and lose to Vance or whomever. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. The point is they want to maintain control of this sort of nominal leftwing party of a country.
Nima: Well, on that note, on that happy note, that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for listening. We will be continuing to track the emergence of more of these billionaire-backed groups. In the days ahead, rest assured, there will be more, and that is why we continue to be your local Citations Needed crew. So thank you again for your ongoing support of the show. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener-funded. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Monday, October 13, 2025.
