Priorities USA to co-host resistance happy hour with ‘our friends at Google’

The resistance’s bar tab is on Google.

Priorities USA, a top Democratic super PAC with an affiliated dark money group, is convening a summit of left-wing digital activists on Wednesday afternoon to deliver a post-mortem on Vice President Kamala Harris’s election loss and strategize how to “resist the Republican agenda,” according to an invite obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Afterwards, Priorities USA invited attendees to attend an afterparty that will be “co-hosted by our friends at Google.”

“Recognizing that there is still a lot of data to be collected and analysis to be done, we hope that you will join our 2024 Digital Retrospective during which we will discuss what was done online this cycle and how we can prepare to resist the Republican agenda,” Priorities USA said in the email invitation. “This is just an initial conversation, we will be in touch in the coming weeks and months with information to join additional deeper dive conversations, briefings, and planning meetings.”

“For those in DC, we hope that you will also join us for a social hour co-hosted by our friends at Google,” the invite stated.

Priorities USA, whose major donors include billionaire financier George Soros and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, closed its invite with a quote from Harris’s concession speech: “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

A Google spokesman confirmed that the company will host a happy hour for Priorities USA on Wednesday, but will not participate in Priorities USA’s “digital retrospective” event preceding it.

“We did not participate in creating the content of the meeting,” the Google spokesman told the Free Beacon. “As they do for large ad buyers on both sides of the aisle, our political sales team will host some drinks after it.”

Google’s move to host a happy hour for Priorities USA, which spent $75 million on “digital mobilization” efforts to support Harris, comes as Donald Trump sets Big Tech in his crosshairs.

Trump has long been a fierce critic of Google, alleging that the company has “rigged” its search engine to inundate users with negative stories about him. Though Trump signaled on the campaign trail he wasn’t willing to break up Google as a monopoly so long as it serves as a bulwark against China, the president-elect said he would do “something” about its search engine to “make sure it’s more fair.”

“I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place,” Trump said on the campaign trail.

Big Tech is also on edge over Trump’s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) to serve as attorney general. During his four terms in the House, Gaetz established himself as one of the most outspoken Republican supporters of antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech, going so far as to praise President Joe Biden’s Justice Department during a 2023 hearing for its antitrust legal efforts against Google.

“I think you’re doing a good job, and that is a painful admission for me to have to make about anyone who works at the Department of Justice,” Gaetz told Biden’s Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, adding that he was “perhaps just as concerned about the monopoly power of Google” and urged him to “continue to pursue those cases,” the Washington Post reported.