This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Political action committees are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all federal election funding, with about US$6.3 billion raised and $4.8 billion spent since January 2025. But their outsized political influence does not just come from their wallets. It’s also generated from their names.

Political strategists are adopting PAC names that signal the opposite political goals from what those organizations truly intend. They hope to taint voter perception of the candidates or ballot initiatives to which they donate.

And, as our research shows, the strategy is working.

The history of deceptive PAC naming

Typically, PAC names borrow expressions from the party they wish to help, like ActBlue or WinRed, which raised the most money in the 2024 federal election cycle.

Many of those names have been ridiculed for their overreliance on throwaway clichés. In 2012, comedian Stephen Colbert created the PAC Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to prove the point.

But a more sinister custom has emerged. Our research has shown that for the past decade or so, PACs have engaged in what we call “tactical naming,” the practice of giving laws and PACs names designed to manipulate voter perception.

One tactic is to choose a name derived from slogans of the opposing party, falsely signaling ideological kinship to gain the trust of voters from the other side. In 2014, for example, the PAC Americans for Progressive Action provided no support for Democratic candidates. Instead, it gave over $1.3 million to Republican Gabriel Gomez’s 2014 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Examples can be found on both sides of the aisle. The PAC Patriot Majority USA, which sports a gun-toting minuteman logo and foregrounds the word “patriot,” a term that recent research indicates is a strong marker of conservative political identity, ran ads in support of Democratic candidates. It also opposed Republican candidates in multiple states for years.

The PAC Protect Women Ohio Action, Inc. contributed to conservative ads opposing a ballot initiative that limited Ohio’s authority to restrict abortion.

Deceptive PAC naming today

Tactical naming continues in current primaries.

Earlier in this primary cycle, the PACs Real Change and Lead Left ran television ads and mailers in competitive congressional districts attacking Democratic candidates, ostensibly from the left. The ads accused candidates of standing with President Donald Trump, opposing Medicare for all and “cashing in on Trump’s terror.”

To any casual observer, Real Change and Lead Left look like progressive groups holding Democrats accountable. But closer scrutiny reveals something else.

When people subscribed to Real Change’s email list, they received emails confirming their subscriptions that routed through cavalryllc.com. That’s the domain of Cavalry LLC, one of Washington’s premier Republican communications firms, founded by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff.

Cavalry has received more than $10 million from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership. And investigative reports revealed that Caleb Crosby, the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund, founded a political compliance firm that supported personnel at two conservative PACs that used the same unusual address as Lead Left: a Staples store in Tallahassee, Florida.

The science behind the names

It’s tempting to think that this tactic won’t work on the politically savvy people who pay attention to PAC names. But our research shows otherwise.

To test the effects of deceptive PAC names, we conducted a controlled online experiment involving more than 650 participants recruited through Prolific, an online academic research studies platform. The sample was balanced by gender and diverse in age, though participants were somewhat more educated than the general U.S. population.

Participants evaluated four proposed laws before and after learning that each law was sponsored by a PAC. The PAC’s name was manipulated to be either congruent with the law’s ideological direction, incongruent with it or politically neutral. For example, a left-leaning environmental proposal might be sponsored by a PAC called Save the Earth, Americans for Oil or Smith. By comparing participants’ ratings before and after exposure to those names, we measured the extent to which naming alone could alter attitudes toward otherwise identical proposals.

We found that misleading PAC names significantly shifted voter opinion. We also found that PAC names were most effective when they were deceptive. When participants who supported a particular law were told that an incongruently named PAC was sponsoring it, their support for that law dropped sharply, even when the law’s text sat right in front of them.

For example, when people who identified as left-leaning already favored a law that expedited refugee worker rights, their favorability ratings dropped sharply when they learned that the sponsoring PAC had a right-signaling name, Building the Wall. By contrast, learning that an aptly named PAC, Humane Treatment of Migrants, had sponsored the same law did not significantly affect the ratings of left-leaning people and barely affected the ratings of right-leaning people.

Our research also found that stronger partisans are more susceptible to this tactic. The more firmly someone identified with a political party, the greater the swing in their opinion when an inapt PAC name was introduced.

Sophisticated voters are not automatically inoculated – if anything, their stronger priors make them more vulnerable to cues that appear to confirm or threaten their political identity.

What makes this especially troubling is where tactical names appear. Federal regulations require that PACs disclose their names “in a clear and conspicuous manner” in their political advertisements.

One might wonder whether tactical naming is just everyday politics. But weaponizing names introduces a hazard that goes far beyond ordinary negative campaigning.

A Republican group running ads against Democrats is unremarkable. A Republican group pretending to be a Democratic group to run those same ads is something different: It is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the informational environment in which voters decide whom to support.

Can anything be done?

Our research addressed this question, and our conclusions are sobering.

An outright ban on deceptive PAC names would face serious First Amendment obstacles. Naming a PAC is a form of expression that receives constitutional protection.

Courts have been reluctant to allow the government to dictate how political organizations present themselves. In Doctors for a Healthy Montana v. Fox in 2020, a federal district court struck down a Montana law requiring PACs to name themselves in a way that clearly identified the economic or special interest of a majority of their contributors. The court found that the statute did more than require disclosure of factual information; it unconstitutionally dictated “how that information must be packaged to the public.”

Required disclaimers, such as warnings to voters not to treat a PAC’s name as reliable evidence of its political identity, would probably be the most legally viable intervention. Even their constitutionality is uncertain, however.

That leaves two other remedies: transparency journalism and voter skepticism.

The reporting on Real Change PAC, which followed money through shell companies, traced email domains and mapped connections to the Congressional Leadership Fund, is the kind of investigative work that gives voters a fighting chance.

Voters can also follow a simple rule of thumb: When you see a PAC name, don’t treat it as gospel. Ask who is paying for it and who benefits.

Be mindful when the PAC is critical of a person or position that is supported by the very party that the PAC appears to serve. And remember that the most dangerous political actors don’t always attack your political allies.

Sometimes, they just steal their names.

Brian Sheppard is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University. Andrew Moshirnia is Associate Professor & Director of Education – Business Law & Taxation at Monash University.

Whenever Trump doesn’t like the facts, he calls it “fake news” or does what he’s doing here: tries to shoot the messenger by threatening them with a lawsuit.

The administration has been sending National Guard troops to various US cities ever since it became clear its mass deportation efforts weren’t nearly as popular with US residents (or the troops themselves!) as they were with the bigoted ghouls who infested the White House.

Trump claimed the National Guard deployments were necessary because the cities they were sent to (Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, etc.) were so gutted by violent crime that the only solution was one that pushes up against the edges of martial law.

Most of the early deployments targeted states or cities where Trump had failed to secure a majority of the popular vote. Later deployments to Tennessee and Louisiana were actually welcomed by state reps who were more closely aligned with MAGA ideals than the rights and liberties of their states’ residents.

But no matter where the National Guard went, the promised reduction in violent crime failed to materialize. It’s an assumption anyone could make, given that it was more a show of force meant to force more cities and states to bend the knee, rather than a well-designed plan to address alleged crime epidemics.

The Center for American Progress released a report early last month, one that showed National Guard deployments weren’t doing much in terms of crime. Instead, the administration was spending more than a billion dollars ($1.7 billion at last count) in an attempt to take credit for the status quo: a long, sharp decline in violent crime rates that long proceeded either of Trump’s two presidential terms.

In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions. On average, the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened to be deployed saw a 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025, before the National Guard was first deployed to Los Angeles.

These recent violent crime trends, predating even Trump’s second inauguration, suggest that, more than likely, violent crime would have continued trending downward in these cities by the end of 2025, regardless of any additional interventions. However, the Trump administration has ignored this fact when reporting year-over-year crime statistics to claim these extreme tactics have made Americans safer.

Trump is the real lagging indicator here. The report was released July 10. It took until a few days ago for Trump to threaten the left-leaning think tank with a bogus libel lawsuit. This threat was delivered by someone in Trump’s personal employ, rather than any of the dozens (or hundreds) of lawyers employed by the federal government, for obvious reasons.

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Libel lawsuits are personal causes of action. The federal government cannot file a defamation lawsuit on its own behalf. Hence, the need to portray this criticism of the administration’s policies and claims are being portrayed as defaming Trump personally for the sole purpose of silencing critics of this iteration of the federal government.

The New York Times report doesn’t contain anything specific Trump’s lawyer claimed was defamatory in the threat letter he issued on behalf of his boss. It’s safe to assume Brito provided no specifics, but relied on intentional vagueness in hopes of making the legal threat stick. And because it’s an obviously bogus legal threat, the letter concludes with a phrase almost always deployed by people who know they have no legitimate case to make:

The letter ended: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

No problem, said the Center for American Progress lawyers. We are governed accordingly:

“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”

Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.

We’ll see if Trump tries to press this case or whether he’ll wander off to yell at the next thing that momentarily makes him angry. But even if he moves off of this particular provocation, he’s still got a year to let this simmer on the back burner.

It’s performative but it still serves a purpose: to deter others who might publish facts Trump doesn’t like but may not have the money, time, or legal acumen to fight back when the president decides he wants to sue in his personal capacity. And while we all know this is meaningless and unjustified, the fact is that Trump has pretty much unlimited amounts of time and money and, apparently, enough lawyers on hand willing to jeopardize their careers and reputations for a guy who ultimately may stiff them when it’s time to collect their legal fees.

We’ve been talking for a while now about how the rush (much of it driven by politicians’ obsession with Jonathan Haidt’s mostly debunked book) to ban kids from social media is dangerously stupid. It misdiagnoses the problem and creates a solution that both does not work and makes actual problems worse. Previous reporting has already shown that a massive number of kids easily get around the bans, and among those who haven’t were those who actually relied on these services for community. Given the obvious failures and the clear damage already done in Australia, it’s bizarre that so many other countries are still rushing to copy it.

But with France’s Constitutional Council recently blocking Emmanuel Macron’s version (shoved into law almost immediately after he sat down with Haidt), some sense is finally creeping into the conversation, with a growing number of experts speaking out against blanket blocks:

The rash of new laws and the subsequent backlash is prompting people to ask if social media bans are going too far, too fast — and whether there may be a smarter way to protect kids online than forcing them off.

Lorena Giuberti Coutinho, an online safety commissioner for Brazil’s independent data protection authority, told POLITICO that social media bans increasingly appear “quite hard to impose,” and questioned whether global momentum for that approach would persist.

“The incentives for teenagers to continue on social media are quite strong because this is where they communicate,” said Coutinho.

This matters, because for the last year or so it’s felt almost inevitable that social media bans would become the global default — despite the science not supporting them, and despite nobody having any real evidence about what the bans themselves would do to kids. Indeed, for all the people running around screaming about how this needs to be done to stop companies from “experimenting on children,” cutting kids off from their communities online is, itself, an experiment on the mental health and psyche of children without any understanding of what it might do.

It’s especially notable that this skepticism is coming from Brazil’s online safety commissioner, because, as we discussed recently on Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Brazil has been going through yet another social media moral panic, one that has forced Discord to disable livestreaming, after a horrific case in which a 13-year-old girl was allegedly coerced by other users into taking her own life (Discord disputes that the death itself was broadcast live). Everything about that story is horrifying. But blaming it on the existence of livestreaming on one particular platform — when the exact same tech exists on nearly every other platform — mostly guarantees that the next tragedy happens somewhere the regulators aren’t looking.

But whatever you make of that particular mess, the pushback isn’t limited to Brazil. It’s showing up more or less everywhere these bans have been tried.

In the United States, protecting children from social media is a priority among politicians of all partisan stripes — from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to California Governor Gavin Newsom. But no legislative ban for teen users has moved forward at either the state or federal level.

There are broad concerns that bans could violate children’s free speech rights by restricting their ability to engage with lawful speech online, as well as pushback from activists, like those in the LGBTQ+ community, who say that social media can also be a place where otherwise isolated youth can stay informed and connect with peers.

Surprisingly, even the activist groups responsible for some of the worst anti-internet bills of the last half decade — like 5Rights, whose founder has been drafting California’s censorship laws — are now calling out the dangers of blanket bans:

A report by a group of youth behavioral experts, delivered ahead of an expected EU-wide proposal this fall, appeared doubtful that age restrictions alone are the solution. One pointed to “circumvention” around Australia’s solution. The experts make a point of anticipating changing user habits: They recommend that solutions are aimed at all the online places where young people will be spending their time, which increasingly includes AI chatbots.

Several experts who consulted the European Commission on the proposed measures, including Leanda Barrington-Leach of the 5Rights Foundation and the London School of Economics’ Sonia Livingstone, wrote a letter to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to warn against blanket measures. Total bans are not in line with protecting children’s fundamental rights because they cut off their access to information, which may lead them to more dangerous, unregulated online spaces, the letter says.

This might be the one and only thing I’ve ever agreed with 5Rights on, even if the global rush to ban social media is the entirely predictable end result of years of their own misleading advocacy.

Right now the activists who pushed these bans look a lot like the dog who caught the car. They got the laws they wanted and now the evidence suggests that these laws don’t actually benefit kids and may, in fact, harm them. There’s a real cost to putting in place these superficial “something must be done, this is something, we will do this” kinds of solutions, rather than dealing with the actual underlying root causes. So instead of funding real mental health support, or building better tools that let people protect themselves, we got a pile of headline-grabbing laws that make politicians look busy while leaving every underlying problem exactly where it was.

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We’ve moved into a new era where the administration’s constant cruelty, violence, and actual murders simply aren’t enough to keep Trump appeased or entertained. ICE is now goosing its arrest numbers by arresting holders of expired visas at domestic airports. Now we’re being treated to additional abject cruelty in the places where boots are on the ground.

An option only rarely secured by agencies that oversee jails — confined areas filled with convicted criminals that might need more immediate response alternatives — is now the subject of a $20 million no-bid contract. Once fulfilled, this will outfit any number of federal immigration officers with gloves capable of standing in for Tasers.

And while the company selling these G.L.O.V.Es (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters) has draped itself with CYA fine print to offload any eventual deaths/maiming on owner/operators, it’s really just giving them all they need to joy buzzer people into submission/death while absolving themselves of their contributory actions.

Hell, the owner’s manual even pretends Excited Delirium is an actual medical condition, even when the AMA (and others) refuse to recognize a “syndrome” that somehow is only witnessed by cops who have restrained someone to death. It rephrases this as an “Agitated Chaotic Event (ACE)”, which would suggest that agitation and chaos are things cops bring the restraint party while simultaneously suggesting agitation and chaos are things in need of additional force deployment.

Managing chaos in a prison might call for some immediate incapacitation options. But ICE et al are operating out in the open. Any situation that’s uncontrollable is largely the fault of officers who’ve never been properly trained to do the job they’re now doing. CBP historically has handled illegal border crossings, patrolling southern deserts and/or pitching in with Border Patrol operations at border crossing points. Prior to Trump’s revamp of ICE to focus entirely on any migrant anywhere in the nation, ICE spent most of its time handling the customs side of its purview.

Now, every DHS agency (and plenty of voluntolds from the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals Service, etc.) is a masked jump-out squad participating in open-air ambushes and kidnappings. Unsurprisingly, they’re so bad at it that they routinely murder people literally any other law enforcement agency would arrest peacefully, if not ignore completely.

Having realized no one is up for the task — especially since ICE has drastically cut back its training regime while simultaneously loosening entry requirements — the government must now rely on increased violence to meet its arrest goals.

Enter the G.L.O.V.E. And enter Tom Homan, who just sees this as the next step in the “truth, justice, and the American way” continuum:

White House border czar Tom Homan defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers gloves that deliver painful electric shocks, calling them a tool to help officers end confrontations without using deadly force.

“It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan said Thursday in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.” “You can’t just go from 0 to 100, right, and the first thing you go for is lethal force.”

Well, what’s wrong with whips? I mean, that’s a historic method that was used to great effect to make non-whites fall in line while slavery was still the operative policy, as well as for years after the slaves had been freed. How about fire hoses? That takes us all the way up to the mid-60s, where meeting “0 to 100” midway meant pinning people to the wall with water pressure meant to subdue industrial fires.

Why is shocking people with electrified gloves suddenly a smart option when ICE, CBP, etc. have never had to rely on this tech prior to this point? Homan pretends it’s about compliance when it’s really about subjugation and maximum pain infliction. He says the gloves are something that sits between the “0 to 100” scale of law enforcement violence, deliberately ignoring the fact that ICE officers will choose the option closest to 100 no matter where on the 0-100 scale the threat level actually is.

If we could trust immigration officers to not murder people simply because they’re (1) inconvenient or (2) driving vehicles, we might be able to accept a “compliance” tool in limited situations, like detention centers or border crossings. But Homan — and the agencies he (sort of) represents — want to see these used everywhere, all the time. Why limit yourself to punching someone when you can immobilize them before handing out a beating? Why consider de-escalation when everything you wear and everything you hear from your supervisors says do unto others first.

A nation that has still managed to raise its voice against Trump despite being beaten, shot, stripped of due process rights, and depicted as “garbage” from “shithole countries” is going to be silenced, immobilized, and violated by officers who now get to add stealth stun options to the “roving death squad” loadout they’ve preferred ever since Trump took office again. Homan is just here to blame the victims for their own injuries or deaths.

Earlier this month I noted that Elon Musk’s Starlink is giving very unsubtle indications that the company wants to jump into the wireless business. I also noted that there’s a very long list of reasons why this isn’t likely to go well for him, ranging from the extremely high cost of network build-outs, to the fact that entrenched giants like AT&T and Verizon are very good at crushing insurgents.

As a launch gets closer we’ve seen more details into how Starlink actually hopes to try and make a wireless phone service work. Experts have already noted that the low-Earth-orbit Starlink satellite network is generally too congested to scale in the way the SpaceX IPO claims it can. The IPO projects a jump from 10 million to 300+ million in just a few years; an impossible feat.

Some had speculated that Starlink would accomplish this by buying a company like T-Mobile. The company also is poised to buy around $17 billion in AWS-4 and H-block wireless spectrum licenses from Echostar after Brendan Carr specifically launched an “investigation” into Echostar making it possible.

But instead of buying T-Mobile, Musk seems convinced that he can launch a nationwide wireless phone service by simply plunking down thousands of meshed femtocells installed on customer rooftops alongside existing LEO satellite dishes. Such femtocells would eat up backhaul capacity shared with the already capacity-constrained satellite-delivered broadband.

Even normally staid analysts at industry trade mags have called the idea incredibly stupid:

“This ranks as one of the top three dumbest ideas in my four decades of being in this industry,” said Earl Lum, the founder of analyst company EJL Wireless Research. What’s currently unclear is SpaceX’s precise definition of a small cell, but a typical outdoor small cell would come with power output of 5 watts per channel, in Lum’s book, and be difficult to install at residential properties.

“You need a real antenna in three sectors. To deploy this, it means you have to have a pole on a roof that’s good enough to hang three radios and three antennas, which is going to be hard,” he said. “You would have to go through the standard permitting for any macro cell site, and at that point why do you want a small cell?”

Keep in mind that Musk’s companies (especially Starlink and Tesla solar) don’t really have, or believe in, functional customer service. So the idea that existing Starlink customers are going to make all this work without coherent support is another wrinkle. There’s very little indication this would work; and it’s near impossible to make it scale up in urban areas where they’d compete with AT&T and Verizon.

Musk and friends may belatedly realize the unworkable nature of the idea later, at which point they just gobble up T-Mobile, which has steadily become shittier and shittier in the wake of the Sprint merger (precisely as deal critics predicted). Though even that would be very expensive and include lengthy, cumbersome integration, with no guarantee of meaningful success.

This week, MrWilson takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a comment about opportunistic ICE arrests:

ICE keeps trying to find more victims to prove the false narrative of how many undocumented immigrants there are in the country, so individual agents probably want to make their own abductions to show dear leader that their jackboots are loyal rather than hand it off to someone else.

In second place, it’s a response to our post about the MAGA GOP warning about communism while taking ownership stakes in private companies:

Another angle is seeing it as just more fascism. The Nazi government in Germany was deep in it with corporations and seized assets and controlled factories and controlled how they did business

Trump isn’t seizing or nationalizing the means of production for the benefit of the people or the workers. He’s getting more power and money for his corruption machine. We’re not seeing all of what’s happening in the background, but you know he’s personally benefiting from these moves.

And when a Democrat gets into the White House, watch for Fox News and GOP politicians to decry the “communism” that Democrats are perpetuating and they’ll ignore Trump’s moves entirely or our local propaganda repeater will stop by to tell us it was legal under Trump and completely different but any Democrats doing 5% of the same thing are dirty commies.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the federal court ruling that said recommendation algorithms aren’t protected speech. First, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a commenter who asserted that “the government needs the power to control what companies recommend”:

No. No, it does not. As the article asks, do you really want the Trump administration in control of what content social media services can/will recommend? Because that seems like a surefire way to privilege TRASH speech over all other kinds. But feel free to point out how that wouldn’t be the case!

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about the line in the ruling saying the social media companies had not shown that their feeds constitute fully protected speech:

Uh… Protected speech is assumed. The court needs to fully explain how something is not protected. They have utterly failed to do this so far.

Not that i don’t think plenty of these companies, and plenty of algorithms, pretty much suck to one degree or another. However, one is free to search or refresh or better train how the algorithm serves them, at least to a point. And one is free to leave. One is also free to educate one’s children in media literacy.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is MrWilson yet again, this time with another reply to that same commenter:

Yes, we should definitely embrace fascism to defeat the fascists!

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment from last week’s comments post, in which I lamented that there were no more Star Trek jokes for me to highlight:

Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!

(Though several commenters associated “this far and no further” even more strongly with the iconic final episode of the initial run of Columbo, another greatest-show-of-all-time. Techdirt readers have great taste!)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from PB&J about MAGA’s fearmongering about communism:

obligatory meme: “If Those Kids Could Read They’d Be Very Upset”

We all know that 50% of Americans don’t know what communism is — like, they literally cannot define it — and another 49% think it means “The Democrats”.

Finally, it’s one more anonymous reaction to the ruling that algorithms aren’t protected speech because they just reflect what people want back to them:

Today I learned that portrait photography is not protected under the Constitution because it is merely a mirror held up to that person.

That’s all for this week, folks!