It’s Past Time for Progressive Victory To Address Fair Criticisms
I recently published an article about a group of connected but distinct legal entities that together are referred to as, “Progressive Victory.”
Many reactions were given to my article, and a lot of them stunk.
Simultaneously, many more reactions were given to a content creator named, “KiloTheGiant” who made a YouTube video about Progressive Victory a few days before my article came out. And the reactions that continue to pour in around Kilo's video stink just as much as the reactions to my article.
So, in this piece I am going to respond, and bring to light additional concerns that were left out of my first article for the sake of brevity.
PART 1: THE KEFFALS THUMBNAIL STRATEGY
The political commentary community never fails to disappoint - even when your expectations are already incredibly low - this time, by employing the Keffals Thumbnail Strategy to deflect valid criticisms of Progressive Victory being made by me, Kilo, and others.
Rather than engaging in the facts-of-the matter, they throw up one red herring after another to argue about that instead.
The appropriate response to that tactic would be to say, “Ok, we can talk about all of the red herrings you want to. But only after we address the issues that have been raised which you are desperately trying to avoid.”
But since we all know by now that these people aren’t going to play ball, we just need to go Herring Hunting today. Then, once all of their red herrings have been shot down, we’ll go right back to the start where they need to address the perfectly valid concerns that have been raised about their affiliation with a collection of dark money groups.
RED HERRING #1 - “THEY'RE ALL MRGIRL FANS AND THAT GUY IS A PEDO! SO EVERYTHING THEY SAY IS INVALID!”
Calling someone a pedophile in political discourse is the new, “you're a Nazi!” It's the sort of defense tactic that only someone truly on the ropes will leap for in order to escape.
And that's the latest strategy that's being used to discredit Kilo and several others expressing criticisms of PV, because many of them are members of MrGirl's community.
But there are a lot of problems with this approach at discrediting voices critical of PV.
PROBLEM 1: MrGirl is completely irrelevant to discussions around PV.
He’s only being brought up to assassinate the character of the people being critical of PV. That’s it.
PROBLEM 2: I am critical of PV but I also hate MrGirl. Not only do I hate him, many in his community hate me too.
I am despised by many members of his community for releasing a documentary about him two years ago about all the reasons he is a horrible person. It’s hard to imagine a bigger MrGirl anti-fan than me. And yet, I agree with most of what Kilo has had to say about PV, and I have expressed additional concerns of my own based on extensive professional campaign experience.
PROBLEM 3: Destiny
I am not about to argue that if you like MrGirl there isn’t something off about you. However, if defensive PV creators are going to claim that anyone who finds MrGirl as anything other than an irredeemable monster, should be completely ignored and shunned… I would remind them that no one was a bigger defender and booster of MrGirl than Destiny, the same guy who many of these PV creators hold up as their idol.
And I say this as someone who was, but no longer is, a massive Destiny hater for this exact reason. Even after releasing my documentary, Destiny spoke very highly of MrGirl - even saying MrGirl was one of the few people he said he would “ride or die” for.
“OK, but Destiny hates him now too. So, checkmate Londre!”
Wrong.
The reasons Destiny cut ties with MrGirl had nothing to do with MrGirl being a pedo, or a rapist, or an abuser, or a cat-fucker. Destiny cut ties with MrGirl because MrGirl had a meltdown over how Destiny was moderating his subreddit and eventually after MrGirl announced he was going to publish a manifesto about Destiny being a sexual predator - but then failed to deliver anything close to that.
In other words, if you’re going to assess that Kilo and some of his friends should be ignored on the basis of liking MrGirl despite everything we know about him (MrGirl)… Fine. But then you have to disavow your hero, Destiny, too. And we all know that’s not going to happen.
The whole MrGirl thing couldn't be more stupid and pointless.
RED HERRING #2: “WHAT HAVE THESE HATERS DONE TO ELECT ANYONE?”
Much like the MrGirl deflection, this one - The “Lil Bro” Deflection - also has multiple layers of stupid to it and can’t be applied to me.
First, if you believe in liberalism and American Democracy, you aren't going to promote the idea that “if you don't engage with our democracy at least as much as me, and in the same ways as me, you have no right to speak about American Democracy.”
By that logic, I could easily silence 90+% of PV paid creators. But I'm not going to because that's dumb and antithetical to every left-wing political flavor you prefer.
But let’s work this out a little more.
Even if we said, “Kilo needs to sit down and shut up because… what has he done to elect Democrats?” How would that map on to the audiences of the creators using that deflection?
I guarantee most Twitch Pol chatters haven’t knocked a single door or made a single phone call for a single candidate or cause in their life.
I guess they're all morons who should shut up and bow to the complete superiority of a… professional streamer?
Lol ok.
But the final layer of stupid with this red-herring is that the underlying suggestion (“Don’t listen to concerns raised by people lacking political experience”) is that it implies that a person with a great deal of professional political experience and a deep desire to see Democrats elected wouldn’t be criticizing PV… But, just like with the MrGirl deflection, this one doesn’t map onto me either.
Kilo may have less political experience than someone who was recently paid to get politically engaged. But I have way more political experience than virtually everyone trying to dismiss his concerns; yet, based on my extensive political experience, I see the majority of Kilo’s concerns as totally valid and have additional concerns of my own.
To be clear and concise on this point:
I have no interest lil-bro'ing anyone.
But, I certainly could if I wanted to.
So, I don’t think that’s a deflection road worth going down.
RED HERRING #3: “KILO AND HIS FRIENDS ARE ATTACKING PV BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEF WITH PV CREATORS”
First, no one in the online political commentary space can say they don’t have some amount of beef with some number of their fellow content creators.
So, if we dismiss the central criticisms of people like Kilo and myself, based on having some amount of beef with someone involved in some way with the thing we’re criticizing… then every political content creator should just retire immediately because by this logic, no one “in this space” would ever be allowed to speak on anything ever.
Stupid.
Let’s get more specific though.
The most often cited “beef” is between Whick (a PV-paid creator who I am very friendly with and have zero “beef” with) and Kilo (a PV critic who I am also friendly with and have no beef).
Personally, I think Kilo took a few pot shots at Whick in his video that weren’t necessary or helpful, but I also think Whick overreacted to them. (But who among us hasn’t overreacted to moments where we feel slighted?)
But now the conflict between Whick and Kilo is being blown out of proportion and used by people like PV Posterboy, IRI, to dismiss every single criticism of PV — but that cynical and moronic take falls apart when you realize that Whick and I remain on good terms despite my harsh criticisms of PV.
RED HERRING #4: “DON’T YOU WANT DEMOCRATS TO WIN?!”
Me? Yes, I do. And I’ve dedicated most of my adult life to doing just that.
I could leave it there, but let’s make sure this herring, just like the rest of them is well and truly dead.
I’m not about to claim that “there is no way that a group like Progressive Victory could swing an election one way or another,” because I know that wouldn’t be correct.
There are endless examples of close elections we could point to.
Hell, the first time I ran for office at the age of 18 after working on the Obama campaign, I ran against two longtime incumbents in a three-way race to be one of the two elected Town Supervisors, and lost by 3 votes.
However, that’s all beside the point.
Here’s why.
First, unless you have an elementary understanding of political advocacy or are just regurgitating someone else’s talking points, you would know that what is being suggested through this red-herring is complete malarky.
The suggestion is actually two-fold:
- If you question or criticize an organization that supports Democrats, you are putting that organization at risk, and thereby are putting Democrats at risk, too.
- If we don’t greenlight political organizations to operate however they want, we can’t possibly win. Therefore, you don’t care about winning at all. (This is usually accompanied by statements like, “The other side is doing it!”)
Both suggestions are appeals to emotion and uninformed intuition.
Let’s break it down real slow for the people in the back.
(Re: SUGGESTION 1: RISK TO DEMS)
Consider this allegory.
There's a newly built 5-story apartment building.
It’s full of tenants, including John, who lives in an apartment on the first floor.
One day, John noticed a small crack on the wall. So he called the apartment manager who told him not to worry about it. The crack got a little bigger the next day, so John called the apartment owner, who also told John not to worry about it and to stop bothering him and management about the crack.
The next day John spotted another little crack by his window. Wondering if maybe some rain water leaked around the edge of the window causing the new crack, John walked over and lightly touched the crack causing the entire apartment to collapse and kill John and everyone inside.
Was it John's fault the building caved in and everyone died?
Of course not. It's the fault of the architects and engineers who designed the building, and it's the fault of the managers for neglecting to address these flaws.
If you think that PV is actually weathering some kind of serious, tough, hard-core pressure through the questions and concerns that have been raised about them, you’re revealing how little experience you have with organizations like these and the pressures they need to be built to withstand.
If PV collapses because a few people asked some basic questions and there is collateral damage as a result, that's on the people who designed the organization from the start.
Clearly, that hasn’t happened yet - and I doubt it will (ie: this is all just a scare tactic) - but IF you DO believe that MAY happen, then what you are saying is that this organization was structured in a way that puts Democrats at risk. And if that worries you, you should start asking questions instead of avoiding them.
(RE: SUGGESTION 2: WE GOTTA BE WILLING TO STOOP AS LOW AS THE BAD GUYS)
First, as a matter of principle, we all know that isn't true.
No one is saying we shouldn't be prepared to play political hardball. But we all must agree that we have to draw the line somewhere.
Imagine if in a few months Donald Trump beats President Biden.
Are we going to say, “well, when Trump wasn’t re-elected he incited an insurrection to hold on to power, so we should do that for Biden!”
If we really believed that “we have to be willing to stoop as low as our opponents,” then: Yes.
But we wouldn’t do that because we have principled hard lines — like respecting the outcomes of our electoral system.
Certainly, politics can be a dirty game. And sometimes you have to make hard ethical determinations.
But we all know that if we fully accept the idea that “we have to be willing to stoop as low as our opponents to win” that's how we end up with the eventuality of meeting our one-time opponents at the end of the horseshoe.
Ethical considerations aside, this red herring is even more stupid as a practical matter.
Everything that PV actually does (according to PV creators) could be done without PV entirely.
- Discord calls with other creators?
- Getting online political communities to knock doors and make phone calls for candidates?
You don’t need a shady 501c4 or a dark-money “Hybrid PAC” like PV to do any of that.
Problem is, apart from Destiny, every other creator is too lazy to take the lead and organize their communities to get directly involved in an election.
But you don’t even need to make it as complicated as Destiny’s past efforts have been.
Every streamer could easily say, “If all you do is listen to me on stream all day, that’s a risk for Democrats, so make sure you take some time this week to go down to your local Democratic Party office to volunteer.”
If you’re not willing to do that, unless you’re getting paid, you have no right to lecture anyone about how little they have done or how much little concern they have about getting Democrats elected.
But maybe it’s better to have some support from a group like PV? Maybe, but that still doesn’t account for the fact that PV could do everything we are told they do if they were a simple PAC.
They have chosen not to go that route and its perfectly fair to ask: Why?
And if the answers to that that question are shit, it’s perfectly fair to continue to ask.
And if no answers are provided at all, it’s perfectly fair to do your best to fill in the blanks.
(And if any of that gives you diaper rash, go tell PV to be honest and transparent. That likely solves all of this. Simple. Done. Finito.)
RED HERRING #5: “PV DOES SO MUCH! (5-mins later: PV DOES HARDLY ANYTHING AT ALL!)”
Listen to any of the rambling defenses of PV up to this point and you’ll notice something…
PV defenders will make a dramatic emotional appeal that ‘it would be an absolute travesty if something happened to this indispensable and irreplaceable organization!’
Then minutes later, the same people will make the opposite claim.
They’ll laugh off every concern by saying things like, ‘Why are people so mad about this wittle group paying a few wittle creators a few bucks to be on a monthly Discord call and encourages us to encourage our audiences to get politically engaged irl?’
Which is it?
“PV does so much that you ought not criticize them.”
OR
“PV does so little that you ought not criticize them”
It actually doesn’t matter, however. Because no organization that seeks to influence our elections, no matter their scale or who’s side they are on, should be beyond reproach.
Any self-respecting political operator, Progressive, liberal, American… knows that.
RED HERRING #6: “IF WE LET OUR PRINCIPLES GET IN THE WAY, WE WON'T HAVE GROUPS LIKE PV”
This is a horribly cynical and stupid take.
If a group goes this collectively berzerk when people ask simple questions about the group, is that the kind of group we should even want to have?
If a group asks influencers and their audiences to sacrifice their principles “for the greater good” when the good the group does could easily be done without sacrificing anyones principles, is that the kind of group we should (hypothetically) mourn the loss of?
“We need to be willing to put our principles aside so that Democrats can win and so that a handful of streamers can get a nice little handout.”
(This sounds hyperbolic, but it’s actually very close to what one PV creator said recently)
But it's also hilariously contradictory to one of the most fundamental defenses originally offered by PV creators, “nothing about PV violates our principles.”
Again…
Which is it?
“PV operates in ways that violate our principles BUT the net benefit makes it worth it”
OR
“PV doesn't operate in ways that violate our principles at all”
Pick one.
And besides… even when PV led many to sacrifice their principles to support PV’s efforts to re-elect Jamaal Bowman while publicly opposing him or “Freak Left” representatives like him on a principled personal basis… Bowman still got utterly clobbered.
So even if you foolishly towed the line that “I gotta plug my nose, put my personal principles to the side in order to win…” Well, you just sacrificed your principles for absolutley nothing.
RED HERRING SUMMARY:
When you see this many people throwing up this many red herrings to distract from the same thing, it says a lot.
It screams of desperation and panic.
And it all could have been avoided had the architects of PV and those who chose to get involved with them just been honest and transparent from the start (omg what a crazy expectation, right?!) or even made efforts to become more forthright after the first round of questions and criticisms.
But since the question and concerns haven’t been adequately answered, you now have dozens of influencers tying themselves into knots, as they come under increasing pressure from their audiences to respond.
All this while the same influencers are simultaneously still being tempted by PV with the lifeblood of every influencer - Easy Money and Special Status (part of an exclusive special group).
All the while, they’re all being threatened by their one shared kryptonite: their massive fragile egos.
What do these people say all the time? “Just take the L.”
But they can’t bring themselves to do that. So here we are.
WHAT NEXT?
At this stage of the game, there are only a few ways this could go:
- PV Leadership starts acting like leaders: fix their organization and properly address the concerns that have been raised.
- PV Leadership continues as-is and continues to let influencers handle PV’s PR. (How’s that going?)
And if they go with Option 2 (as I expect they will), then there are only a few possible outcomes for the influencers:
- Hold the line, concede nothing, continue to refuse to answer questions, and pray it all works out and that none of the other influencers fuck it up for you.
- Ask PV to fix things, and if they don’t, just graciously let go. Acknowledge you should have done more due diligence before signing on with PV but you thought it sounded like a good thing and you would get paid for it, so you grabbed the opportunity. [I think most people would find this to be a perfectly understandable statement.]
- Admit that:
- A bit of PV $ supersedes your principles [but admitting this also means admitting that claiming you couldn’t possibly be influenced by money - let alone a bit of PV $ - was always bogus.]
- That PV is a dark money group & you simply don’t care - and that any prior concerns you may have expressed regarding money in politics were pure virtue signaling, and/or that you didn’t know what "Dark Money" meant when you said you opposed it, but said it anyway.
BOTTOM LINE:
Everyone involved in this is an individual so I will leave it to them to react as individuals.
But if I were a betting man, I would bet that most PV-paid influencers are going to hold on for dear life, concede nothing, and hope for the best.
Because what’s the alternative?
Graciously acknowledging you may have made a mistake? These are influencers we’re talking about, remember. So that’s almost certainly out of the question.
And the only other alternative would doom their political commentary careers. These people will never admit their integrity could be bought so easily. And they certainly won’t admit that they don’t know the first thing about dark money or political campaigns.
If they did, they’d be saying, “My principles are pretty flimsy, and I don’t actually know what I’m talking about when I talk about politics.”
That’s why they’re panicking. They’re backed into a corner with only a few options left, and most of them suck in one way or another.
But that’s no one’s fault but PV’s and theirs.
And no, I’m not going to tell PV or their influencers precisely what to do next.
If they need that level of hand-holding - as some have berated me about - then they have no business operating or involving themselves with a big-boy political organization, let alone lecturing others about politics or much of anything at all.
Sorry, kids, but “politics ain’t beanbag.”
PS: Here are those additional questions or concerns no one has addressed that I mentioned at the start of the article…
ONE: I’m still super confused about PV founder Sam Dryzmala’s claims about seed funding for their 501c4. He said PV-Action got seed funding from foundations in 2022, but the PV-Action didn’t exist until 2023.
Someone please make that make sense.
TWO: We need to have an honest conversation (especially on the left) about money in politics and dark money especially. I have been saying for years that the Left says they hate dark money, but they don’t mean it. Bowman vs. Latimer is a perfect example.
Half of the people bitching about APAIC pouring an absurd amount of money into the race to defeat Bowman are framing it through the “Anti-Dark Money” lens, but have themselves created dark money PACs and/or super-dark 501c4s of their own; in some cases, 501c4s are complaining on Twitter about the evils of dark money taking out Bowman.
THREE: There is a very real possibility that there was illegal/improper coordination between PVA and PVPAC to support Jamaal Bowman.
According to Dryzmala and others, Progressive Victory has paid streamers through the 501c4. However, Dryzmala also said the following:
“These events [ex: canvassing for Bowman] are mostly done based off of online fundraising that we do with the streamers. So the streamers that we’re working with, a lot of them will raise money for these events, uh, and then they will recruit their audience members [to participate]. And the reason why we’re raising money for it is to, like I said, is to subsidize hotel rooms for people who wouldn’t be able to pay their own way.”
Sounds innocent enough, right?
Problem is, if you’ve been in the campaign world as long as I have, when money changes this many hands in the realm of campaign finance that should raise some red flags.
It did for me.
Just look at this graphic I made to try and map out this bizarre scheme.
I know enough about this stuff to know this is significantly more complex than it needs to be — unless there is something else going on here.
And being that Dryzmala is a highly experienced political operator, there is no way this wasn’t all very purposefully designed to function in precisely this way vs. the significantly simplified way the Super PAC I worked for in 2020 chose to execute a very similar effort (turning online activists with no political experience into an army of pro-level irl volunteers).
I also know enough about this stuff to know when to say, “It smells really bad but I can’t say for certain what statutes and regulations may be getting violated,” so I’m going to call in some help.
The best I could do in a pinch was ChatGPT. And thankfully, ChatGPT (despite often getting the “Wikipedia is your source!? LUL” Treatment) offered a pretty good explanation.
It’s a little dry at the surface, but the implications are very serious for all involved. Take a look.
FOUR: PV has effectively (intentionally or not) used money to shut down criticisms of the fundamentals of their organization. By that I mean, if 99% of lefty creators are either paid by PV or are in the orbit of a paid PV creator, who’s going to keep them honest? It cuts across all the cliques too. They’re paying VGGers, DGGers, Hasan-types… And you know the parasocial fans aren’t going to challenge their idols.
There is tremendous group pressure from multiple angles not to rock the PV boat in the slightest. For example: No one wants to give their lunch away (-$) or risk the lunch ($) of their friends, either.
FINAL NOTE: As I’ve said dozens of times at this point… it’s not the underlying idea and mission of PV that’s the problem. The problem is how the organization was set up, the built-in lack of transparency, and the continued refusal of those involved with PV to grapple with the obvious ethical dilemmas that have been raised and begin the process of offering the basic level of honesty and transparency demanded of them.
Unfortunately, even if they attempt a major course correction now… in all likelihood, it’s going to be too little too late.
Time will tell.
