Ep. 28 - Who's Spending $517 Million on Congress This Year | Everyone Knows

$517 million into House and Senate races, and the biggest spenders are not oil or pharma. Three of the top four did not exist twenty years ago.

Who Bought Congress and the Law They're Buying | Everyone Knows Ep. 28

Everyone Knows | Episode 28 | Starborne Studios

The old record was $461 million, and that covered an entire presidential year. We are at $517 million with two months to go. At least $294 million came from four sectors, and one built a scorecard ranking your congressman on how well he lines up with their agenda. Brian Bullock pulls the filings apart, follows the money into the primaries where it decides things, and lays out the rule it is all being spent to buy.

Three parts. All of them matter.

FIRST, the money and the scorecard. Crypto, artificial intelligence, big tech and online sports betting are now the four biggest corporate political spenders in the country. Brian walks the playbook crypto wrote in 2024, when Fairshake took out an eighteen year Senate Banking chairman in Ohio and funded two Democrats elsewhere the same cycle. Party was never the point. AI copied it. Leading the Future raised roughly $140 million, most of it from a handful of men. A second group announced it will spend over $100 million and built a congressional scorecard, funded by the industry doing the scoring. Then the detail that sticks. Those ads never mention artificial intelligence. Reporters checked hundreds.

SECOND, preemption, and what one word erases. Washington passes a national rule and every state law on the subject stops working. Last year a ten year freeze on state AI laws passed the House, tied to $42 billion in rural broadband money as leverage. Then at 4:30 in the morning on July 1st, the Senate voted 99 to 1 to strip it out. They cannot get ninety nine votes to name a post office. Brian gets into who killed it, why a Tennessee senator walked away from a compromise she had negotiated, and how seventeen Republican governors, forty state attorneys general and the Heritage Foundation ended up on the same side. Five months later it came back as an executive order.

THIRD, the fight nobody is covering, and it is not the one you have been told about. This is not progressives yelling about billionaires. It starts in a high school gym in a town of fourteen thousand, residents at a microphone asking their city council questions it could not answer. The names on this side are ones you would not expect, taking real incoming from their own party. Brian names every one, and ends with the question to put to your congressman that he cannot dodge.

Everyone Knows is one man reading the story straight. No panel, no talking points. If you're tired of the spin, you're in the right place.

ABOUT EVERYONE KNOWS: Everyone Knows is an independent podcast hosted by Brian Bullock — author, storyteller, and founder of Starborne Studios. Every episode breaks down the stories that matter using one simple framework — who benefits, who gets hurt, why now, and what happens next. No cable news theatrics. No party line. Just a straight read on what's actually going on and what it means for regular people. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

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