“If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.” - Louis Brandeis

This week’s round-up has good and bad news. An appeals court ruled against Trump’s tariffs, anti-monopolist Congressman Jerry Nadler retired to hand over power to a new generation, and Lyft ended surge pricing because customers hate it so much That said, the main story from last week I’m going to look at is the creation of a new political slush fund by titans in Silicon Valley. I don’t want to be alarmist, but if it goes to plan, it could functionally subvert elections in America.

To understand why, we have to start with the strategy used by crypto venture capitalists to enact their agenda. In 2024, Ripple, Coinbase, and Andreessen Horowitz - all of whom were facing legal action from the government - created a political slush fund called Fairshake. In the last electoral cycle, they spent $139 million. In Silicon Valley, that’s not very much, but in an electoral campaign, that’s a nuclear amount of money.

To understand why this political action committee, or PAC, is so dangerous, we have to start with the role of money in politics. And that role is actually quite simple - money buys advertising. It’s expensive to talk to voters. But if someone can just spend an infinite amount of money to call you a trans-loving pedophile, you will likely lose your race. For instance, in Ohio in 2024, long-time Senator Sherrod Brown faced $40 million of crypto spending alleging all sorts of things, and that chipped away at his popularity such that he lost.

Today, Fairshake can flip most politicians without spending a dime, secure in the knowledge that aspiring office-seekers wouldn’t want to lose just over what they perceive as a minor policy around finance. These companies got everything they wanted; they are now running crypto policy for Trump, and have terrified most members of Congress into voting for whatever they want. Fairshake has amassed another big war chest for 2026, and it’s unlikely that crypto’s power will be dented until there’s a financial crash.

Unfortunately, the lesson of Fairshake was not lost on others in Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, who is on the board of Meta and involved in Fairshake, has been organizing this strategy in other areas. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and AI venture capital investors, have now chosen to launch their own Fairshake-style slush funds, to make it impossible to regulate generative AI or big tech.

The net effect of these pots of money is that it could become functionally impossible to enact public policy around AI through our democratic system. As AI becomes more important, that means American law will look the way Andreessen and a few other titans want it to look. Moreover, other corporate giants will start playing in their areas, closing off other spaces to democracy.

Now, it’s always been difficult, especially in the Citizens United era, to make progress, as big money does drown out a lot of good policy. Indeed, what we’re really seeing is the final stages of an organized attempt from the 1970s onward to allow money to overwhelm democracy. The Lever’s Master Plan is an excellent podcast series on it. These massive slush funds could mean that voting really has become ornamental.

If that’s the case, and we’re in a system where most people really have few rights, then there’s no way to gain redress for wrongs through peaceful means. And that is scary. Most people have no experience, no reference point, for what a world like that means. So accustomed as we are to our system of checks and balances, peaceful transitions of power, and general sense of trust that the basic stuff - like electricity or not having cops rob you - will work. But a world of “might makes right” is pretty common historically speaking. In some ways, the American Revolution was designed to thwart such a world, and ultimately has, such that we take it for granted.

But if there is no redress for basic wrongs among most people, then the fabric of our society will rip more fully. And if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics.

We saw something along these lines in December, when Luigi Mangione allegedly shot a wealthy health care CEO, to the cheers of a not-so-small number of Americans. And when a Blackstone executive was murdered a month ago, there was a similar, if more muted, popular reaction. The social contract isn’t just some abstract notion, it really does exist. And when the superrich are too aggressive, and provide literally no recourse, it causes a broad loss of faith in our system. People start to take the law in their own hands in a variety of ways, and their friends and neighbors, far from stopping them, cheer it on. We’re already seeing that sentiment reflected in polling on juries.

President John F. Kennedy once laid out the broad principle by saying “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The net result of this kind of dynamic isn’t good. It’s not a grand revolution followed by a happy ending, but a ramp-up of security spending by elites and a society built increasingly on fear. Everyone becomes increasingly distrustful, because most people can’t access the courts or have any real sense of justice for being wronged. But the wealthy have their own fears, as billionaires are bossed around by centi-billionaires, and the specter of violence hangs in the air everywhere.

In 1890, during the debates over the Sherman Antitrust Act, Senator John Sherman made this point about anger at large industrial agglomerations of power.

You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before. The popular mind is agitated with problems that may disturb social order, and among them all none is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition.

Similarly, President Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union, also noted it.

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.

There’s a lot of rhetoric these days about authoritarianism and other forms of illiberal governance that are emerging to run society without the consent of the public. And it’s easy to point to the President and blame him for it, or if you’re a Republican, blame the preceding administration. But the truth is much less comforting. It is the billionaires in Silicon Valley, and those who befriended and enabled them, who have brought us to this dangerous and unstable moment. It’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his lifelong crusade to unleash money in politics, and men like Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, who have torn up the fabric of a peaceful society.

I realize that’s a gloomy observation. And it’s possible that I’m overstating it. Money isn’t everything. The media is fragmenting, and the public is tuning out the main advertising channels that matter. Still, it’s worth observing that something fundamental in our political system might have snapped this week.

And now, the rest of the round-up. There’s a lot of fun stuff in there, including a rebellion of dentists against private equity, the first merger trial of the Trump era, and the new acting head of the Centers for Disease Control, who at one point called for people to be able to sell their organs. And lots of private antitrust cases are launching...