* The firms are the next career stepping stone for campaign workers. If you have worked on half a dozen Democratic campaigns, you presumably believe in the cause and are unlikely to want to start working on Republican campaigns where you disagree with the candidate. (Maybe you won't be as good at working on GOP campaigns either). * If you are a politician, you are unlikely to be too excited to hire the firm that in the last election cycle wrote an ad trashing some of the positions you old. You are also more likely to get referred to a firm by a politician from the same party as you.
You might have firms that work with both parties, but they are likely to be working with centrist candidates from those parties.
So if this is a strategy firm that has mostly done political work for Republican candidates and causes, it seems perfectly reasonable to call it a "Republican strategy firm"
A consulting firm that advertises itself as being "born from political campaigns" and being "right of center." Both things on the second slide of their homepage.
>Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign
>Penn met with Trump in February and November 2019 to give him advice on his 2020 re-election strategy.
The company claims to be right wing, why would you deny it?
What's contradictory about a strategist who worked for Ds in 2008 and was working for Rs by 2016? Hell, there's a whole term describing the large set of people who made that shift in that exact time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama%E2%80%93Trump_voters
This might be a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Unity_My_Ass
12 matches for republican 1 match for conservative 0 matches for democrat
It's a firm comprised of former republican political talent. Maybe you're just as willing to fan the flames of political war as those you accuse?
They also seem to be into crypto.
The firm itself seems to advertise a “republican” outlook, and was also apparently founded initially as a strategy firm for the Republican Party.
I don't think this is malignment, per se: Facebook makes a big show of being a progressive company (internally) with a nominally neutral political outlook. Hiring a Republican strategy firm undermines that image: it demonstrates that, push come to shove, Facebook's commitment to these things is primarily a facade intended to deflect criticism.
Ask any progressive, they will say there's nothing politically neutral about preventing unionization: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
I also don't think people are falling for rainbow capitalism internally or not. I think people generally understand that it is just a show and the only color on the rainbow they care about is green.
I doubt the use of a GOP firm reflects anything beyond a desire to persuade Republican voters and lawmakers.
Having a political career means shifting between consulting companies strongly associated with political parties, direct party employment, campaign employment, government employment when your party is in power, "think tanks," "journalism," and employment as a lobbyist for government contractors or industries with a legislative agenda.
Journalists drop the keyfabe when they're speaking casually, sometimes accidentally. They do go out of their way to do so when the subject is associated with a party their employer doesn't approve of.
Including the truth about party association doesn't make a story more or less truthful. The problem is when they leave it out, or create an association out of whole cloth to fit a narrative.
> What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent in the article? Is it just to use the negative connotation most WP readers have about the Republican party to malign Facebook a little more?
> The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC.
Political consulting firms -- especially those that specialize in strategy, oppo, or ads -- are very often partisan-aligned. That's how the biz works.
A person self identifies with a party that has questionable (/s) practices in a democracy and they’re being maligned. Jokes are funny because they have truth.
If you don't see that in both predominant US parties, you probably aren't looking. Of course Facebook pays the Democratic Party millions a year to look the other way. Can't have good privacy laws, ya know.
Sure, to me it reads like Facebook and the GOP are working hand in hand to defame poor startup TikTok. In reality, Facebook donates millions of dollars to the Democratic Party to ensure their operations and ... practices ... are safely legal and unregulated.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563
I'm not certain how much different it would have made to the main thrust of the story to mention that it worked with a GOP firm. Based on the donations, I'm pretty sure they have used Democrat firms as well for similar purposes, if not this one. The author doesn't mention it, but assuming omission means it didn't happen isn't a safe assumption.
Another point, not sure it's a realistic idea to paint TikTok as anything other than a data harvesting tool for the CCP. Seems like they would be similar to Kapersky in that it's just a spying / infiltration tool used by adversarial governments.
Aside from that, the choice of a Republican focused group makes sense since the strategy was to assert threats to traditional values and appeals to nationalism / anti-China sentiment.
I noticed this back in the late 2000s when I read newspapers about state politicians who were caught in corruption scandals. If the politician were a Republican, their party affiliation would be mentioned in the headline. If they were a Democrat, that fact would be mentioned in the article's continuation on a page farther back in the newspaper, if at all.
I offer no judgement on whether this is right or wrong, but it is what is done.