Sure, some lefty politicians take big bucks from corporate interests and big labor and then represent those interests.  And sure, other lefty pols take little bucks from little people (usually matched by the dark money of ShareBlue), often because they can't get the big stuff, and then declare it more virtuous.  Just ask Elizabeth Warren on that one.  But rarely do these Democrats take big bucks from big corporates — and then...insist they really represent little guys.

The exception is Kamala Harris.

She, as it happens, is bankrolled largely by the billionaires of Silicon Valley, yet in her corporate-woman suit, she claims to be really all about standing up for the little guy.

IOWA: I’m headed your way tomorrow to lay out how we can protect our communities from gun violence, ensure tax fairness for the middle class, and build an America that works for everyone, not just the top 1%. RSVP now to attend our town hall:https://t.co/g7H8ocv2Id

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 9, 2019

Obviously, she's going to try to slop the voters the Silicon Valley way: by offering them free stuff, something they pay for on the back end by loss of privacy, loss of freedom, and heavy monitoring and regulation.  Sounds good to them.

Her backers are Silicon Valley's top billionaire finest, the ones who censor conservatives on their social media monopolies and virtue-signal about their greenness and progressive values, even as they employ Chinese slave labor for their Made in (coal-spewing black-river) China products.  They're the same people who fly in private jets to international conferences to lecture the rest of us about doing with less to save the Earth.  They're the same guys who guard their oligopolies against potential disruptors by driving the prices of start-up garages (and the adjacent housing) sky-high.  In short, they sound like Big Government, except just a little more tyrannical, given their lack of diverse views. 

Those guys.  Nasty, hypocritical lot.

Joel Kotkin, in an impressive piece that ran in City Journal yesterday, says Harris is their frontwoman and larded up with their money:

Yet the national obsession with ethnicity and novelty obscures the more important reality: Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party.  She has been a hit in all the important places — the Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley — that financed Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

Unlike Warren and Sanders, or Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants.  As California's attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms.  These corporate behemoths now occupy 20 percent of Silicon Valley's office space, and they have undermined the start-up culture that once drove the area's growth.

Who could be better for them than Harris, whose unprincipled career as a prosecutor puts her in a Vishinsky-like light.  The former prosecutor is famous for condoning lying and false confessions, sending innocent people to prison, and employing manipulative tricks to get the crime statistics to go her way so she could be "Smart on Crime."  As Kotkin wrote yesterday, she's "Silicon Valley's dream of political control."  She's even out promoting their interests in this bill.  She's just perfect for the Silicon Valley barons' own values and purposes in a broader sense, which would explain why they are backing her.

Kotkin writes:

The shift in tech firms' focus has fit perfectly with the trajectory of Harris's career.  As district attorney of San Francisco, Harris had the opportunity to cultivate the tech aristocracy.  Her intermittently "tough on crime" positions would not offend corporate executives who find themselves in a city that even the New York Times has labelled "dystopia by the bay" — rife with petty crime, homelessness, and sometimes violent mentally-ill people.

Elected state attorney general in 2010, Harris got decidedly mixed results, with some notable abuses of office and a demonstrated disinterest in individual rights and privacy protections — a record that alienated some on the left.  On economics, she talked tough on energy companies and homebuilders, but when it came to privacy legislation, she supported policies favored by her tech backers.

And just as the barons say they are all about the little guy, well, now we see Kamala Harris put out there by them to say she's all for standing up for the little guy, too.

With the broad public already holding the Silicon Valley barons in widespread disapproval, something tells me the voters aren't going to be fooled by Harris's shtick, either.

Image credit: Ted Eytan via Flickr, CC B-SA 2.0.