Bunking with the Devil How a Brash Startup Became One of the Most Prominent Publishers of Fake News Laura Moser, a liberal candidate for Congress in Texas, didn't want to win. It was May 2018, and a few weeks earlier, her Democratic opponent, Representative Lizzie Fletcher, had defeated six well-funded Democrats in a Republican-leaning Houston district to win the nomination. Moser felt that she was on a better track than her fellow Democratic challengers. She had raised more money, but other contenders had more conventional credentials. A real estate agent and former Houston city council member, she had worked for the Obama administration, but her experience in the private sector dwarfed the two local legislators who had been defeated. More important, she was the darling of elite circles in Texas and Washington. She was friends with Nancy Pelosi and had raised money for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She had just been appointed as senior vice president of marketing at Lyft, a ride-hailing startup, when she quit after a single day on the job to run for office. In Moser, the Democratic Party had one of the best chances in a decade to win a seat in the House of Representatives, and many Democrats felt it was a better use of her talents than Lyft. Moser was one of the few to emerge from the wreckage of Trump’s election unscathed, having defeated Fletcher with the backing of local Democratic leaders and organizations across Houston. She was also one of the few young politicians who seemed to have a realistic shot at knocking off a Republican incumbent in the South. She was no political celebrity; for much of her career, she stayed below the radar while others competed for media attention. After college, she’d worked for the Obama campaign, for former Representative Beto O’Rourke, and on a Houston City Council campaign that she finished after her boss became the mayor. By 2018, she was eager to run for office again—this time, the United States Congress. She was an unlikely figure to emerge as a beacon of hope for Democrats in the year of the Blue Wave. But Moser never got her chance. On May 22, five days before the election, a report about her campaign exploded on Twitter. She was, the Daily Beast reported, a “phony candidate” invented by a mysterious “left-wing D.C. think tank.” Her platform—raising the minimum wage, criminal justice reform, paid family leave, and a host of other issues—was borrowed from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. She was living on the campaign trail with her two-year-old son; her wife worked two jobs to make ends meet. Moser was not new to conspiracy theories. For a decade, she had been at the center of various right-wing smears. As a freshman at the University of Texas, she was targeted by right-wing trolls, who dug up dirt on her from an old high school video. She told BuzzFeed in May that she had been stalked by a “creepy guy” in Austin, Texas, who had broken into her home to make her fear for her safety. By October 2018, Moser was being referred to as “Kyrsten Sinema” in vicious right-wing attacks. On social media, she had become a figure of fascination for conservatives and leftists. In her hometown of Austin, some of her old high school friends had been attacked in vicious online posts, even to the point where they withdrew from social media, afraid to read the comments. The attacks were not just the result of her political actions; they were personal. The Daily Beast story was a culmination of years of vitriol against Moser by conspiracy theorists and the right wing, culminating in a social media campaign to make Moser—who had just started a job as a senior adviser to a local political party—the target of what appeared to be a plot by Democratic politicians to elect a Democrat in a conservative area by using a political "fake front." For months, the right-wing attacks about Moser had targeted her as a Democrat, but she never expected to become a target because of her work on political issues or her progressive politics. In fact, she considered herself to be a moderating force, someone who was pragmatic and realistic. But her candidacy quickly became subsumed into the larger conversation about the dangers of fake news. “Laura, are you the one?” was an anonymous tweet about Moser that quickly became a viral sensation. Another started with a picture of the candidate and read, “Meet Laura Moser: This is what evil Lizzie Fletcher must have looked like when she was committing crimes.” The tweet would be retweeted more than 20,000 times and became an epithet for Moser: She was the “evil” candidate who worked for the Democrats. Moser had done the work of the nefarious “Deep State.” “What are the odds they are going to send her to DC, knowing what we know now?” wrote one conservative troll. Another wrote that “the whole campaign was a hoax. Deep state.” Moser had run in a conservative district, but for Republicans, the Moser conspiracy was only the latest example of liberal conspiracies and dirty tricks. When the Tea Party swept into Congress in the 2010 midterms, the Republican National Committee responded by creating a project to highlight “The Liberal Media” and its role in perpetuating liberal narratives. “This is the most egregious example of liberal media bias that we’ve seen to date,” RNC spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany said. “The liberal press is so invested in a certain narrative that they are willing to twist or ignore facts to fit their agenda.” Moser was attacked not only as a Democrat, but as a pawn of the Left. She even got hit for allegedly receiving government money, when she won a fellowship as an Obama-era political appointee. The Daily Beast story included a long list of individuals, most of them right-wing ideologues, who were described as being connected to a shadowy organization with links to the Democratic Party and its fundraising mechanisms, the Democracy Alliance. Moser was described as “a liberal think tank puppet.” The article, which is a roundup of previously reported information about the Democracy Alliance, didn’t name Moser’s think tank. Rather, it called the nonprofit group “a progressive group with at least $40 million in annual revenue.” Although it was untrue, and the people named in the story vehemently denied any involvement in the political organization, many on the right believed that this was a coordinated attack by Democrats against Moser. “#LauraMoser—a DNC pawn, or puppet, or both?” wrote Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, after tweeting about the Daily Beast story. Moser denied having any connection to the Democracy Alliance or any other Democratic or progressive group, writing in an op-ed for The New York Times, “This is absurd, unethical, and fundamentally political.” But to many in the conservative media, that didn’t matter. As the story about Moser’s links to the Democracy Alliance spread, she realized that the organization that she’d built her career around was becoming a threat to her political career. In her op-ed in the Times, she wrote, “These conspiracies against me are about more than me. They are a campaign to discredit the entire progressive movement. They represent an ongoing strategy of the Right to sow confusion and undermine our progressive movement.” Since her first, failed run for office in the early 2010s, Moser had built a reputation on being the progressive candidate who could beat a Republican in a red district. The New York Times profiled her as a young political force in Texas who had grown up in a conservative area and overcome her conservative roots to become a progressive. She was known as a moderate, someone who would actually fit into red districts. Her second campaign in 2018 was the opposite of the first. Moser didn’t try to appeal to the far left or even the center. “I've been doing the same thing I always have—working on kitchen-table issues and making friends with people across the aisle,” she told The Washington Post. “I've never tried to run as a progressive, although I'm considered one.” This time, she called for criminal justice reform, which was increasingly popular among Democrats, and pushed for her constituents to use Uber to get to work or school since there were no Metro stations close to her district. But her platform was no longer about local issues, and she did little to change her reputation as a progressive: The Times labeled her a “Democratic activist” when describing her background,