Yesterday, Taylor Lorenz posted what amounts to a hit piece on Democratic influencers and how they are funded. The trouble is, she didn’t stop to fully understand campaign finance laws or get a campaign finance attorney to read through the contract she more than hinted at as being nefarious.

My credentials in this space include the fact that I have worked for labor in the political space since 2010. Labor is often vilified in this country and unfairly critiqued as a way to mitigate their power.  Collectively, unions are amongst the most heavily scrutinized organizations when it comes to funding and finance, especially in the political arena.

When it comes to politics, labor can talk to members and their households and use general membership dues to do it. None of that has to be disclosed, because labor is a group of people with aligned goals and vision.  These communications with members include conversations with politicians or specific issue campaigns. Labor doesn’t have to have a political disclaimer on it.

When the political disclaimer comes into play is when labor is talking to registered voters in the general public. Then, anything they produce has to have a political advertisement disclaimer and they must use their PAC accounts.

The same principal applies here, but almost in the reverse.  As an example, to clarify:

A labor union could pay an influencer to talk about an issue, but they would have to do it with political funds. The influencer would have to disclose that they were funded by a labor’s PAC account.

But, say the PRO Act (Protect the Right to Organize) comes up for a vote and suddenly heats up in Congress, which has happened in the past, and, a group of influencers who are funded in a think tank like setting talk amongst themselves on best practices or share information they’ve collectively gathered. This is a group of people, working together to disseminate information to groups of people that hopefully share a combined goal or vision.  No one organization or institution is directing that topic or telling influencers to cover it. They can talk about it or not.

This is the same principal with independent journalism funded in the exact same way.  Lorenz is free to decide what topics she discusses, no one is pushing her to talk about them in a specific way, and she’s not writing for a specific candidate, organization, or issue campaign.

It’s so clear that Lorenz doesn’t understand any of this in her article, and even more so that she doesn’t understand that this isn’t the result of anything Democrats are doing nefariously, but it is the law of the land and became so when Citizens United was decided in 2010.

This is exactly how people like Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and FOX News personalities share talking points.

Asking Dems to abide by different rules because Lorenz doesn’t understand contracts or SCOTUS rulings is the problem here. And far too consistently, Dems are asked to tie their hands behind their back by the morality police, when the bad actors (Republicans) aren’t even following the law.

Bizarrely, Lorenz doesn’t even seem to understand that it is illegal to use foreign money for American political purposes, which is why the Russia / GOP connections are dubious.  (Quick note for those about to ask: AIPAC is American money used to push a foreign policy objective and not directly funded by Israel.)  Why this mention ranks only a couple of sentences in an article essentially blasting Democratic influencers for following the law only Lorenz can say.

What is obvious is that by not fully understanding this issue, Lorenz kicked up a hornet’s nest that directly affects Democratic influencers, many of whom are Black women.  She did this as a woman who has faced threats herself, including being stalked because she has a large platform.

To double down while also pretending she doesn’t know the harm she caused is disingenuous. In this instance, it’s worse because she claims she’s just exposing a lack of transparency and funding, but she’s guilty of doing this very same thing by not coming forward on how she is funded, herself.

At the end of the day, if you’re going to write a topic in a widely distributed publication and get paid to do so, you have a duty to understand what you’re writing about, and a duty to admit when you get it wrong.

Lorenz is dangerous because her hubris will not allow her to understand that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about here (and honestly, on other topics, as well.)

There’s no one Democratic influencer that doesn’t think that Citizens United begat a money problem in this country and that it should be overturned. In fact, the Dem influencers involved have done more to disclose their involvement than those on the Republican side.

Asking them (and, in fact all Dems) to tie our hands behind our backs and not be allowed to fund ourselves the way the law continues to allow is madness. Moral high grounds are hollow victories when a country is sliding into facism. And when white people, in particular, are not only being funded in a similar fashion but are then preaching about those same moral high grounds to a group that consists of other races, especially Black women, who are regularly harmed in cases like this, it needs to be discussed, an apology given, and a retraction issued.

I hope Wired does the right thing here, because Lorenz has shown she absolutely will not.