Elon Musk's Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign
Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign
By Josh Marshall
October 19, 2024 11:51 a.m.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musks-fake-sites-and-texts-impersonating-the-harris-campaign
"SNIP.........
There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating”, which we’ll return to in a moment.)
I found out about this from this article by Anna Massoglia at OpenSecrets. As far as I can tell she’s the first to report it. The project is the work of Building America’s Future PAC, which seems to be largely and perhaps now entirely funded by Elon Musk. It’s part of a network of Musk-funded PACs which are run and/or organized by a group of operatives who ran Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign. America PAC is another of these entities organized with the same money and by the same operatives. That’s the one doing the canvassing and get out the vote operations.
As Massoglia reports, in late September Building America’s Future set up a site called Progress 2028 which purports to be Kamala Harris’s response or counter to Project 2025. The site is designed to have the general appearance of a Harris site in the sense of being in favor of gun regulation, supportive of gender-affirming care, etc. but with wildly over-the-top versions of those policies. So for instance, it calls for minor children to be able to get sex change operations at school without the knowledge of or interference from parents, calls for a mandatory gun buy-back program etc.
The PAC also funded a text message campaign which pushes the same fake policy messages impersonating Harris’s campaign and drives recipients of the texts to the site.
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Applegrove:
Of course Musk is anti-democracy. He grew up in a system that jettisoned black people out of legal South Africa, and into bantustans if they were children requiring care or schooling, sick, old, unemployed, a student, on your own time, retired or anything else where you were not in that instant working for a white person for shit wages, and into places that had no jobs or tax base so you could live in poverty. As they say, what's bred in the bone..........