Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am here today first with my colleague, John Ross, the digital editor for Current Affairs.

And for today's purposes, it is also relevant that he served for four years on the David Packman show as an assistant producer. John, hello.

Hello, Nathan. Hey, nice to be with you across the office. And it is our great privilege

to be joined by our guest today. She is Taylor Lorenz. She is a leading technology journalist. She's written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Daily Beast, many other places. She is the author of the book, extremely online. The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the internet available from Simon and Schuster.

And today she joins us to discuss her new article in Wired magazine, which is called a

dark money group is secretly funding high-profile democratic influencers.

This story has made quite a splash splash and the people that it is about

have been deeply, deeply pissed off by it. We're delighted to be joined by Taylor Lorenz.

Hello, Taylor. Thanks for having me.

Okay, let's try and understand first the insidious influence network here and kind of how it works.

So maybe you could begin by giving us a little bit of an overview because it's a little

confusing to understand the relationships here because there's like a group called good

influence.

There's a group called chorus.

There's another that I keep thinking is called the 1619 project, but it's called the 1630

fund. Tell us, explain to us first.

Yeah. So good influence is a for-profit influencer marketing company that does like political

campaigns. And they did a bunch with the Kamala Harris campaign. They've done stuff with Democrats

before. Like back in 2024, they were working sort of tightly with the Democratic establishment

on different sort of social good type campaigns.

They still operate as a for-profit company.

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