Murphy elopes with his publicist

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Founder of Soros-funded 'propaganda' news network has visited Biden's White House nearly 20 times

Courier Newsroom CEO Tara McGowan has close access to Biden's White

Here’s a hagiography about Murphy’s new hottie — he’s obviously in good hands as he drives for the presidency:

Published November 3, 2020

Tara McGowan, the 34-year-old founder and CEO of the progressive political org Acronym was running late to Politico’s Women Rule conference last December at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C. Women Rule is a full day of back-to-back discourse among dazzling power women—Nancy Pelosi popped over for a 40-minute sit-down with Politico’s senior Washington correspondent and premier badass Anna Palmer shortly after announcing the Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump—and the atmosphere is downright heady, an estrogenic bath of passion and purpose. McGowan slipped into the full ballroom during a session in which three prominent opinion makers were talking about the difficulties of being female in a male-dominated universe. After a few minutes of polite panelist cross talk, McGowan leaned over to her seatmate and whispered, “When do we get to the part where we just take over?”

She could run that panel herself, having launched something of an insurgency in the world of big-money, big-D Democratic political fundraising, trying to modernize the methods campaigns use to influence “we the people.” As entrepreneurial missions go, hers was bracingly succinct: to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t get re-elected.

Acronym is a digital-first, data-driven nonprofit that was built, according to its “about” page, to advance “progressive causes through innovative communications.” Its affiliated super PAC Pacronym can’t give money directly to a campaign; its employees aren’t even allowed to talk to people working on a campaign. But super PACs can fund political communications, and they often outspend the campaigns themselves. Acronym is the majority investor in the local-news-site organization Courier Newsroom and the communications firm Lockwood Strategy. Courier, which supports local-news sites across multiple states, has drawn fire for intentionally serving up a "progressive" point of view to readers. One could say that reporting a positive take on a local congresswoman bringing health funding to her community is slanted, but it's not fake news.

…. Shadow had dissolved by July, but McGowan and Acronym hadn’t, and she continued her march toward November 3, strategically spending the $100 million she’s raised from investors and donors such as Steven Spielberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and George Soros’s Democracy PAC.

Acronym is a digital-first, data-driven nonprofit that was built, according to its “about” page, to advance “progressive causes through innovative communications.” Its affiliated super PAC Pacronym can’t give money directly to a campaign; its employees aren’t even allowed to talk to people working on a campaign. But super PACs can fund political communications, and they often outspend the campaigns themselves. Acronym is the majority investor in the local-news-site organization Courier Newsroom and the communications firm Lockwood Strategy. Courier, which supports local-news sites across multiple states, has drawn fire for intentionally serving up a "progressive" point of view to readers. One could say that reporting a positive take on a local congresswoman bringing health funding to her community is slanted, but it's not fake news.

McGowan herself will tell you that the structure of Acronym is complex, in the same legal-but-sometimes-frustrating way of similar Republican groups. And it’s true that her data-driven, no-consultants evangelism has upset the ecosystem of the establishment, which pumps most of its money into traditional media. But there’s a reason seasoned investors (many of whom have been flexing their political muscle nearly as long as McGowan has been alive) have given her their trust—i.e., their money—and made hers one of the largest organizations of its kind on the Left and the only one run by a woman.

Watching her pitch what she’s selling to a very small group of very rich capitalists, you see the storyteller in her come out, as she deftly mixes emotion and logic into something quite persuasive. A digital native whose impatience with boomer naivete sometimes trickles out, McGowan has a throwback, almost WWII-era idealism about the sanctity of American democratic principles. Like many successful entrepreneurs of her generation, she possesses what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz has called a “techno-utopian” viewpoint, writing, “McGowan doesn’t seem reckless or sinister enough to intentionally rig an election. Rather, she seems…starry-eyed…prone to believing that a wide array of societal ills can be cured by another innovation, another round of investment, or another app.”

It’s an apt description, but it doesn’t quite capture the hard-knocks realpolitik animating her vision. She’s faced a lot considering she is the founder of a three-and-a-half-year-old business; it’s understandable that she’s grown more suspicious of the transactional nature of D.C. relationships.

McGowan talked with Marie Claire via Zoom from her home/temporary HQ in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, about building a progressive organization, achieving instant notoriety, and, well, just taking over.


Marie Claire: You studied journalism, not computer science. How did you build a $100 million digital-first, multiple-entity organization?
Tara McGowan: I’m a digital native. I didn’t have any formal training, but I was on the Internet from age 10. I was probably within the first 10,000 or 20,000 people on Facebook. In 2013, I got a call from a billionaire I’d never heard of in San Francisco named Tom Steyer. He flew me to San Francisco to start an organization making climate change a voting issue for young people. I was his second hire at NextGen Climate [now NextGen America]. I ran the first digital independent expenditure [i.e., PAC money] program, I think, in the country. Working for Tom is where I started building my reputation as a political strategist thinking differently about how we communicated online, especially in terms of [targeted] advertising.

….

MC: So, about that mission…
TM: From day one, it has been to build power and a digital infrastructure for the progressive movement. We didn’t have the digital strategies, tools, or the will to figure out a better way to get facts and progressive narratives into the news feeds, and psyches, of voters—especially those not paying attention to mainstream media. If we’re not countering disinformation on the same feeds, we’ve lost the information war, which is how Trump was able to be elected. We didn’t fully understand how information was reaching voters because we were using the 2012 playbook and Trump was playing [with] 2016’s.

This part should give any normal person pause before committing to the harridan, but then, Murphy is no normal person – a normal politician, yes, but that’s a different entity entirely:

MC: You must have been a pretty tough kid.
TM: I think it’s because I grew up fighting with my dad. We’re both argumentative, and it made me a strong debater, confident to have the courage of my convictions. It’s pissed off every person in every restaurant my entire life because we get into screaming fights in public.

Look for fun nights out on the D.C. dining circuit.

Uh oh

Lara’s going to have her work cut out for her if she’s to get her lover into the White House: The Washington Post released Top Ten list for preferred presidential nominees this weekend, and Big Ears ain’t on it. Tara’s probably on the phone with Soros and his son as I write _ we’ll see if that works when the next WaPo list comes out.