Larry Lessig

Larry Lessig

Eccentric law professor Larry Lessig didn't just light money on fire in his hopeless effort to help former state Sen. Jim Rubens win New Hampshire's GOP Senate primary on Tuesday. He also laid down with some very mangy dogs in order to do so. As William "Tuck" Tucker elaborates , Lessig's Mayday PAC, a group he created to promote campaign finance reform , donated $104,000 to a super PAC called Stark 360, which is run by an anarcho-libertarian gun nut named Aaron Day.

Day also happens to a vocal opponent of finance reform and even called a state-level proposal that Lessig campaigned for "The Incumbent Protection, Racketeering, and Nullification of the 1st Amendment Bill."

Stark only supported Rubens because they preferred anybody but Scott Brown, who was far too squishy on guns for them. Lessig made common cause with the group regardless, giving them a hundred grand to help stop the former senator from Massachusetts. Even though Lessig's effort didn't come close to working (Brown beat Rubens 50-23), a whole passel of New Hampshire progressives came down hard on him for picking this most disturbing of bedfellows. Lessig responded with characteric cluelessness:



We are not supporting the organization at all. We are supporting joint activities designed to benefit the common ground we have found—support for Jim Rubens in the Republican primary—and only that common ground.

Unfortunately for Lessig, that's not how politics works. You can't give money and lend legitimacy to a group of lunatics (who, among other things, want to dismantle New Hampshire's government) just because you may share one goal in common. In fact, it's a perversely hypocritical move for an idealist who views himself as pursuing an "anti-corruption" agenda, since this kind of deal-making represents the height of cynicism. There are some people it's never okay to ally yourself with, and Aaron Day is exactly such a person.

And unsurprisingly, as community member DocDawg details, it doesn't even look like much of Lessig's money went to aid Rubens' cause at all. Stark's campaign signs pushed their own extremist message, chastising Brown for things like voting in favor of Wall Street regulation and Romneycare. (Is Lessig on board with that?) Stark also paid at least $20,000 for "GOTV" to a company called ARD Ventures—which just happens to be owned by Aaron Day.

All in all, this is a very embarrassing episode for Lessig, who proved that he's utterly in over his head when it comes to electoral politics. Lessig's donors should be pissed that he wasted so much of their money on a pointless cause like Rubens in the first place. But the fact that he aided and abetted ultra-conservative radicals like Stark 360 should really have Mayday PAC's supporters reconsidering altogether.