Musk-backed dark money group behind ‘fake’ Harris manifesto

A Republican organization with ties to Elon Musk has produced an apparently fake manifesto meant to look like Vice President Kamala Harris’ version of the conservative policy initiative Project 2025.

The document, called Progress 2028, contains contradictions and distortions of Harris’ positions on issues such as gun control, fracking, and immigration, according to OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that tracks money in politics.

Various fact-checking organizations, political pundits, news outlets, and representatives of the Harris campaign have declared Progress 2028 to be a fraudulent take on Harris’ agenda — designed to alarm and alienate voters.

The Progress 2028 organization has paid for Facebook and Instagram ads. Several Pennsylvanians say they’ve received texts from Progress 2028, but none agreed to discuss it with a reporter.

Progress 2028 was registered in Virginia in September as a fictitious trade name by the political nonprofit Building America’s Future, according to an Inquirer analysis of public documents.

Building America’s Future, a dark money group, has raised and spent more than $100 million in the last four years, $35 million of which was used to “peel off liberal support” for Harris, according to the New York Times. It has around a dozen corporate and individual backers

One of them is Musk, the world’s richest man, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of the social media platform X, Musk is a major Trump supporter, with a fortune to spend. He’s pledged to randomly give $1 million to Pennsylvania voters every day through Election Day on Nov. 5.

To receive the money, a registered Republican must sign a petition from Musk’s political action committee to support two constitutional amendments — the freedom of speech and the freedom to bear arms. The legality of that program is being debated.

“Trump’s billionaire buddy, Elon Musk …[is] pushing disinformation with Progress 2028,” a Harris campaign official said. “[It’s] all in an effort to deceive voters with ads and texts filled with false information.”

Musk’s representatives as well as officials of Building America’s Future didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Progress 2028 reads like it’s been written by a liberal Democrat with a sunny attitude: “The Biden-Harris administration has made incredible strides toward the kind of progressive future we all want to see.”

Aside from purporting to originate from someone who had nothing to do with its creation, Progress 2028 contains misinformation.

In a recitation of what’s said to be Harris’ agenda, Progress 2028 incorrectly states that Harris has been asserting in the campaign that she’s against fracking. She once was, but has altered her position, which she’s mentioned in speeches and interviews since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race during the summer.

Progress 2028 wrongly says that Harris supports a mandatory gun buyback program: “Kamala will prioritize a nationwide buyback program to get guns off the streets and ensure fairness to all.”

In 2019, Harris said she would endorse such an initiative for assault weapons only. But there’s no evidence that she hassupported a mandatory buyback program in her 2024 campaign, for assault weapons or any other weapon, according to PolitiFact, the fact-checking arm of the Poynter Institute.

Similarly, Progress 2028 misstates some of Harris’ views, making it sound like she’d accord undocumented immigrants special treatment. While Harris has mentioned the need for all people to have health care, no matter their immigration status, she hasn’t said it would be free for them or that it would be funded by taxpayers. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, recently said that Harris does not support programs that would allow undocumented immigrants to qualify for free government health care, free tuition at state universities, or driver’s licenses.

“Progress 2028 is out there to deceive people,” J.J. Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications — a progressive political nonprofit in Harrisburg — said in an interview Tuesday. Abbott, who served as press secretary for former Gov. Tom Wolf, said that Project 2025 is so widely criticized as a “ball-and-chain,” extreme playbook for a second Donald Trump presidency that conservatives had to “distract from it by creating this fake narrative.”

Trump campaign officials — and Trump himself — bristle at the notion that Project 2025 is seen as a reflection of the former president’s views, although much of it was written by former and current Trump staffers.

While Progress 2028 is around 1,200-words long, Project 2025 is a 900-page tome assembled in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation. A proposed overhaul of the federal government, Project 2025 calls for firing thousands of civil servants who could then be replaced by political appointees with demonstrated loyalty to Trump; greatly expanding the power of the president so that much of the government is under executive control; dismantling the Department of Education and other federal agencies; and making large tax cuts.

It would also withdraw the abortion pill mifepristone from the market and eliminate a list of terms from federal regulations: “sexual orientation”; “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; and “gender equality.”

The plan is unpopular. About 57% of registered voters report feeling negatively about Project 2025, according to an NBC News poll in September.

In a statement regarding the linking of Trump to Project 2025 on Tuesday, Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said, “Only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”

The Harris campaign official countered Tuesday night, “Trump is so damaged by his Project 2025 agenda that he and his backers have resorted to pushing this desperate and pathetic lie to deceive voters.”

Asked for comment on Project 2028, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement on Tuesday: “Kamala Harris’ handlers want to talk about anything else but their candidate’s own words: Harris wouldn’t change a thing about the last four years of high prices, wide-open borders, violent crime, and chaos … Manifesto or not, Harris has doubled down on her agenda to wreck our economy and open our southern border to violent criminals.”

Ultimately, some observers question the morality — and legality — of texting a document to voters that’s known to be false.

“Sending direct appeals while impersonating a campaign is some kind of violation,” said Matt Jordan, a misinformation expert at Pennsylvania State University. “It all flows from one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of our lifetime: Citizens United.” The ruling in 2010 enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.

Referencing Musk and how his money is altering politics, Jordan concluded, “This is what a democracy under the thumb of oligarchy looks like: drowning the media eco system in dark money and misinformation.”