As you might imagine, this one isn’t going to win me any friends in the establishment wing of lefty politics. But I never really had any friends there in the first place, so here goes:
Most of the money you give to democratic politicians ends up in the hands of wealthy right-wingers, not because there is some big deep state scheme going on, but rather because media (where nearly all of those donations are spent) is entirely owned and dominated by right-wing people and corporations.
Let’s follow the money for a moment. Imagine you give fifty bucks to your local congressional candidate. Some of that money will pay for overhead – staff, office space, etc. – but most of that cash becomes an ad buy of some kind, whether it’s on the radio, television, or online digital ads. In the 2024 Harris/Walz campaign, nearly 40% of all the spending went to advertising. To be more precise, of the $1.5 billion (that billion with a B) that she raised and spent, $600 million paid for ads.
That’s $600 million of your money that went almost exclusively to right-wing republican CEOs and the corporate media machine that hates you and I more than it hates taxes, and that’s saying something.
A billion and a half dollars spent, and we didn’t build anything. I’ll say that again. We built absolutely nothing.
Republicans don’t do this. Give them money, and they build infrastructure. They build networks and radio stations, and they prop up talking heads in every major and mid-sized city in America. And then they lie, on a loop, 24 hours a day until our neighbors repeat the lies as gospel and vote for republicans as if God herself demanded it.
Then the same right-wing media goons who lie about us each and every day charge us to use their infrastructure at election time, and we pay up. Instead of working against the lie machine, we end up enriching the right’s long-term plans because we only ever seek short term solutions to problems. While we could use that campaign cash to build sustainable long-term response to America’s right-wing media threat, we instead focus only on the immediate short-term need to win an election in the present, and we abandon the future in the process. And we’ll do it again in 2026. I, like you, am already getting the emails.
It's time to stop paying republicans to hate us and it’s time to stop paying them with working class money that we should treat with more respect. It’s time to stop playing the game on our opponent’s home field, paying to be on their networks rather than creating our own. This cycle, and hopefully in every cycle going forward, we should demand much greater discipline from our candidates regarding what they spend and where.
These days, many candidates pledge not to take corporate donations. That’s great, but the same candidates who take that pledge then immediately give all those small dollar donations they brag about to the very corporate parasites they claim to be working against. It’s simply ridiculous, yet every day I get dozens of emails and texts asking if this candidate or that one can have some of my money so they can give it to the people I hate. I’m not going to allow that anymore.
Next time a politician asks for your hard-earned money, ask them a very specific question in return:
What are you going to build with this?
And until someone comes up with a good answer, keep the checkbook closed. Or better yet, just take the amount the candidate was asking for and give it to independent media instead. We’ll put it to much better use.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.