Why the GOP Quietly Funds a Massive Abortion ClinicAIPAC, Money Bullies, and Dems in League with Crypto
With campaign season in full swing, I’m going to give you some insight about money and campaigns in America from my personal experience running for office. Today, I’ll talk about how campaign finance juggernauts like AIPAC, big tech, and crypto leverage their money on candidates and elected officials, the pressure my team personally felt during our campaigns, how we approached it, and then some things everyone can do about the problem both in the short term and long term. I’ll use an example for Republicans and an example for Democrats showing how politicians are willing to sacrifice their deepest core principles on the altar of big money and what I believe to be the top reason why they do it. First, the Republican example. It has to do with how, year in and year out, the GOP, including the most vocal anti-abortion activists in the party, shower money on one of the world’s largest free abortion clinics, and nobody says a thing or even acknowledges it (including Democrats). In case you’re somehow not familiar, the Republican party has been staunchly anti-abortion since 1984, when its official platform first adopted the position that the 14th amendment, protecting life and liberty, applies to embryos and fetuses. It has been avidly fighting to restrict or eliminate abortion access in America ever since. One of its biggest targets in this fight has been Planned Parenthood, the non-profit national reproductive health provider that provides a litany of reproductive and preventative health services, including abortions (where legal). Since using Federal funds for abortions, including through Medicaid, military health plans, federal employee health plans, and other programs, has been banned since the Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, nearly a decade before Republicans adopted their current positions, they have waged their war against Planned Parenthood not by arguing that Federal dollars can’t go to abortions, but by arguing that because money is fungible, any federal money paid out to Planned Parenthood for any reason, even for services that aren’t related to abortion in any way, goes toward abortion and therefore must be ceased. Money for cancer screenings is the same as money for abortions, their logic goes, so federal funds cannot go to Planned Parenthood for cancer screenings. And they have consistently acted on that logic. In 2019, for example, President Trump established the “Protect Life Rule” that prohibited any and all taxpayer dollars from going toward Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide or refer for abortions – no matter how the money gets there or what it is intended to be used for. The same ideology was codified by the Republican Congress in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” so that, as of today, Planned Parenthood can’t receive Medicaid insurance payouts for any service, including non-controversial services like STD testing, contraception, or pregnancy tests. The GOP’s stand against any money going to an organization that could even refer someone for an abortion is so firm that they won’t even fund everyday American healthcare services that have nothing to do with it. In other words, it is such a foundational and entrenched position that they would deny Americans access to cancer screenings in order to preserve it. And yet, curiously, at the same time, they advocate loudly and wholeheartedly to pour billions of American tax dollars into an organization that spends millions of dollars every year providing free abortions through one of the world’s largest free abortion clinics. I’m referring to the Israeli government and its national healthcare system, which provides free abortions to pretty much any Israeli woman under a very wide set of circumstances. And anti-abortion activists are well aware of it. Be’ad Chaim, an Israeli anti-abortion group, posts on its website that 1/5 of pregnancies in Israel end in abortion, that the state sanctions about 20,000 Israeli abortions each year, and that since 1948 “more babies have been aborted in Israel than the number of children that died in the Holocaust,” adding that “Israel is one of the only countries in the world where it is legal to abort a baby up until birth.” Nearly identical talking points to those used here in America against Planned Parenthood. If Republicans are committed to the idea that paying for cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood is the same as paying for abortions at Planned Parenthood, shouldn’t the same logic apply to money given to Israel? Of course it should. But they don’t just ignore the fact that they’re funding one of the world’s biggest abortion clinics, they embrace it. And you don’t hear anything about the hypocrisy from Democrats, either. Why is that? We can’t be sure, but we do know that one of the most feared Political Action Committees in America is the America Israel Public Affairs Committee PAC (AIPAC, for short). A non-partisan PAC that is both massive Republican campaign funder and seeder of chaos in a lot of Democratic primaries, AIPAC spent more than $100 million on Congressional and Federal races in 2024, which I believe made them the single biggest contributor to Congressional races. Of course, there are a lot of groups that contribute to and support candidates, and it has always bought real power and influence. But a little while ago, AIPAC innovated a unique and seemingly more efficient way to engage with American Democracy: using money not just to get access and influence with supportive candidates and officials, but also to surgically target people who speak out against them or their causes with tsunamis of negative spending, a tactic that breeds fear and eliminates opposition. They have been the difference maker in race after race, injecting massive amounts of negative campaign spending against candidates they don’t like. We saw it here in Missouri where they spent $8 million dollars in a Democratic primary, making it the most expensive congressional primary in history, to knock Cori Bush out of Congress in 2024. The last thing that anyone running for office wants to do is land in their crosshairs, particularly because, like it or not, until recently most American voters didn’t even care about or pay attention to the issues that AIPAC wants people to take positions on. The influence this situation creates in American politics is absolutely massive. I can tell you from personal experience that every single campaign in America takes into consideration whether or not things they do or say are going to make them a target of AIPAC and they have to plan for it. My campaign certainly did. I’m going to tell you how we approached the situation and how it sort of ebbed and flowed over the course of the two campaigns because I think it is illustrative of just how much though and effot is put toward this dynamic in American political campaigns. There was no particular reason for AIPAC to target me. Yet they had jumped big into Democratic primaries in the past, and they had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for my second campaign’s eventual general election opponent, Josh Hawley, so the spectre constantly loomed in the background of my campaign and was discussed multiple times. We knew starting out that we would never be AIPAC’s pick no matter the configuration of the primary — neither when we were facing an establishment-backed state senator nor when facing a self-funding billionaire heiress. And while they had mainly focused on House races before, we knew they had begun looking more closely at Senate races. So like many Democratic candidates and campaigns over the years who faced disadvantages in funding and establishment support, especially before the Israel’s government’s recent atrocities in Gaza, we sought in the 2021-2022 cycle to keep AIPAC at bay through a strategy of limited reactive engagement without any public action. When they reached out, we gave simple responses and did a Zoom. On the Zoom, they said their chief concerns were what they described as two factions in Congress, and I’m paragraphing: moralizing politicians who sought to apply their standards for human rights on Israel, and isolationists who advocated for ending American entanglements in the Middle East — and they were concerned I was the latter. In our responses across the engagements, I relied on my background in the Marine Corps to navigate me through what was at times an awkward conversation. This was in 2022, before the razing of Gaza and everything that came with it, so it wasn’t that hard of a thing to do. I’d served in the military in the middle east and had always seen Israel as an ally. Harry Truman, my political hero, had first recognized Israel. And I believed that the Iron Dome was good because it hopefully meant that Israel could defend itself from strikes without invading its neighbors and sparking more regional conflicts. Obviously, a lot has changed since then and I was wrong about how the Iron Dome played out under Netanyahu, who apparently sees it as a shield that lets him wage regional war with limited consequences. Our approach to AIPAC was in stark contrast to our approach to JStreet—an organization that advocates for a two-state solution, dignity for Palestinians, and peace in the region—who we proactively cultivated a relationship with and sought support from, as have many candidates across the spectrum of the Democratic Party’s politics. For AIPAC, our strategy of hopeful avoidance and limited engagement was suggested initially by operatives working on several progressive candidates at the time, including the Senate campaign of then-candidate John Fetterman — and I’ll note it was surprising for me (and I’m confident to those operatives as well) to see over the years that for Fetterman, it was not simply misdirection. But while Fetterman would publish columns and do interviews during his campaign dedicated to Israel-related issues at AIPAC’s request, when AIPAC requested at times in both cycles that we do several public things to show some kind of support for the Israeli government’s actions of the day — like asking for a post celebrating the visit of the Israeli president to Congress — we simply didn’t, hoping our initial engagement was enough to avoid gaining any significant negative attention from them. And while we were certain we would have been up against some amount of AIPAC support for a Republican opponent in 2022, we at least appeared to be successful at avoiding AIPAC’s involvement in our Democratic Primary. In the following cycle, it did not initially appear we’d be as lucky. Now-Congressman Wesley Bell’s entry into our primary was followed by whispers of his ongoing conversations with AIPAC, which truly would have been a difference maker in our primary. But after October 7th, 2023, AIPAC’s priorities significantly shifted, and within a few weeks, he exited the Senate primary to instead challenge then-Congresswoman Cori Bush with millions of dollars from AIPAC at his back. And after that, I don’t believe we received any other outreach or attention from them in our primary — something we hoped to keep that way. They of course supported our Republican opponent in the general election. It’s pretty crazy, though, that our primary campaign for Senate in Missouri, that I’m sure AIPAC was never paying attention to, felt compelled to take the time to make sure it wouldn’t become the target of an organization that had nothing to do with Missouri or the campaign at all. And I’m sure it still happens every day across our country because the power and money AIPAC wields is immense. Immense enough that, as far as I can tell, the entire Republican party is willing to overlook one of its core principles regarding abortion to avoid rocking the boat. While AIPAC was an early-mover in adopting the strategy of primary election wrecking ball, they are no longer the only bully on the block. Big tech and the crypto industry have long been the antithesis of what Democrats purport to support. They are anti-worker, anti-union, pro-massive wealth accumulation, anti-regulation, and accumulate wealth by taking advantage of everyday people. And yet Democrats have been reticent to speak out against them and many full-throatedly support them. If the crypto industry and big tech hadn’t made peace with President Trump, I actually believe you’d find the Democratic party in full support of both as they generally used to be. Although not the only reason, I believe one reason is because they’ve adopted the AIPAC methodology to influencing campaigns. In 2024, pro-Crypto groups spent $10 million in the California Senate primary in order to keep Katie Porter out of the Senate. More recently, they spent $6.5 million in a Texas Democratic primary to successfully knock one of their most vocal opponents, Representative Al Green, out of Congress. The message is clear to Democrats: oppose us and risk personal annihilation. Large swathes have fallen in line, and some have even aligned with Republicans to openly support Crypto, like Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks. My campaign knew that these guys wielded that type of power and, just like with AIPAC, it was something we had to take seriously. Although it seemed very unlikely that the Crypto folks would come in strong for Josh Hawley, and despite the fact that, again, there was no particular reason for them to target me, a significant amount of time was also spent examining our published positions to see if there was anything that might trigger an avalanche of spending against us on that front. Similar to AIPAC’s issues before the fall of 2023, in the pre-data center era that my campaign existed in, most Missourians didn’t care or even think about crypto or most tech issues beyond Facebook being bad. So it honestly didn’t really matter to our constituents what positions we took, and decisions were basically made based on balancing my personal convictions with what the crypto industry was interested in. Which really makes you wonder: is it right that such groups should have so much influence on American politics despite the fact that their issues aren’t even central to most people’s lives? Should the litmus test on being a Member of Congress really be a candidate’s positions on just a few niche issues that the people who spend the most care about? Because that’s what’s happening. When a power PAC goes after someone they don’t like, they don’t attack them for their positions on what the PAC cares about. No one would care. They don’t usually mention their central issue or motivations at all, and often make an effort to hide them while they pour millions of dollars in generic negative attack ads in against their targets. It’s messed up that things work this way. The ability of AIPAC, crypto PACs, and others like them to influence our government and our politicians is unamerican and bad for our country. It’s one of the reasons we’re in the situation we are in. How can you trust politicians that are willing to sacrifice even their most core beliefs when the money is at play, like we see with Republicans on abortion funding and Democrats on tech? As more big-money groups begin to understand how they can grow their power by surgically targeting anyone who disagrees with them, it’s only going to get worse. The good thing is that there is a path forward. In the short term, the one thing that kept us somewhat independent throughout the campaign was the fact that nearly all of our donations consistently came from small dollar independent donors. It’s not perfect, we still felt like we needed to take actions to keep them from turning the big guys into our enemies and negating those donations, but at least we didn’t have to adopt all of their positions and parrot their ideology, we just had to refrain from making big enemies out of them. In the long term, real campaign finance reform, possibly even something like public funding for campaigns that reject PAC assistance, and an end to Citizens United and infinite outside spending will be critical to restoring integrity in our politicians and our elections. So thank you to all of you who supported campaigns around the country so that they can compete in this twisted political landscape and so that we can continue the long climb out of the hole that our democracy has sadly fallen into. Lucas You're currently a free subscriber to Lucas’s Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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