Off Message

by A. C. Fuller

"Possibly," Annie says. "And the fact that you'll need an army of lawyers is exactly the point. That's why these all arrived on the same day. Ameritocracy is now the target of a coordinated attack from the Republican and Democratic parties and their representatives."

  11

  A few days later, we haven't solved any of our legal problems, but we've got a plan. With Peter's help, I found a law firm to study the lawsuits, and to fight them. They're still working out a strategy, but in the meantime they filed counter-suits against the DNC, the RNC, and a few of the outside groups attacking us. They got our court appearances postponed. They even met with Mast, Futch, and Morales and offered to represent them at our expense.

  All told, defending ourselves will cost a hundred thousand dollars a month to start. We can afford that for a few months, but after that we'd need to dig into the fund set aside for the winning candidate. If we go to trial, it'll be millions, which is exactly what our attackers have in mind.

  This leads to the second piece of our plan: fighting the lawsuits in the media, in full public view. Taking a page from the playbook of those who are coming after us, we decided to hit them with a barrage of stories aimed at turning public opinion in our direction.

  So I spent the morning writing an email to Ameritocracy's three million subscribers, recording a video for Twitter and Instagram, and talking to every reporter I could get on the phone. Steph spent the morning calling reporters as well, with the goal of convincing them to take up our cause. The problem is that we know the DNC and RNC are working the phones just as hard. They have staffers with long-standing ties to the major media outlets, and are most likely using every tool they have—including the threat of cutting off access to the general election campaign—to convince reporters not to give Ameritocracy any more sympathetic coverage.

  We expect them to win the fight with the major media, at least partially, so we need to convince our core group of followers to support us and, even more difficult, to fund the struggle.

  By noon, we're ready to send the email and post the videos. There's only one more thing to do. Steph grabs Benjamin from the main office, who walks in holding his laptop. "Ready?" he asks.

  "Ready," Steph and I say together.

  Still standing, he taps a key on the laptop, then hands it to Steph, who sits next to me.

  "It's live?" I ask.

  "Live as can be," Benjamin says.

  He's just created a new fundraising page called Ameritocracy Legal Defense. It's a simple, elegant page complete with our logo and a red graph to chart donations, with the goal of $100,000 a month in ongoing pledges. Under the "Donate Now" button, there's an analysis of the lawsuits written by our legal team that I've spun into plain language. The analysis argues that Ameritocracy is the target of one of the most brazen attacks on democracy in history—one that, by its sheer callousness, proves the necessity of our endeavor.

  Benjamin looks proud, probably because he built the page in an hour. "Nice, right?"

  "Great job," I say. "And it's set up to take a ton of traffic?"

  "Fifty thousand visitors can hit that page and you'll have no issues."

  "Good. Steph, you ready?"

  "Ready."

  "Go."

  Steph logs onto our email program and presses Send. Next she publishes the posts and videos we prepared across all our social media accounts.

  Taking a deep breath, I lean back in the chair. "We've done what we can. Steph, make sure the interns are all over social media for the rest of the day, responding to comments and questions, making our case. I expect to get attacked on cable news, probably in the Times and the Post. Now that we're no longer a cute novelty story, their status-quo thinking will side with the Democrats and Republicans."

  "Will do." Steph takes notes in her phone. "And I've set the rest of the afternoon aside for calls."

  There's a knock at the door and I look up to see my old boss. "Hello, I'm Alex Vane with The Barker. I'm here to speak with Mia Rhodes."

  Steph gives me a look, then takes Benjamin by the hand and leaves.

  Alex is dressed in a blue blazer and a crisp white shirt. He's got an overnight bag slung over his shoulder and the sardonic smile I came to know and sometimes love plastered across his face.

  I hug him awkwardly. "What are you doing here?" I offer him the seat Steph just vacated. "We're kinda in crisis mode because of the lawsuits."

  "I heard. And I have something for you on that. But I wanted to deliver something in person. Something about Robert Mast." He shifts his tone slightly, his voice getting lower and his speech slower. "I know we didn't appreciate you enough when you were at The Barker. I figured we owe you. I owe you."

  Even after the immense support he's given Ameritocracy, if he figures he owes me, I won't contradict him. "What'd you find?"

  Alex pulls a laptop and a stack of papers from his bag. "Many things."

  "Like what?"

  "All I had to go on was what you told me and Bird. Suspicion that Mast was getting outside help. So I started looking at the different ways he might be skirting your finance rules."

  He hands me a single piece of paper, which I see is a printed copy of the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list from July 2019. I scan it, but have no idea how it connects to Mast. "So?"

  "Now look at this one." He hands me another piece of paper. The bestseller list from August 2019 A few of the books have moved places, but it's mostly the same.

  "Okay, but Mast isn't on these lists. Not sure how—"

  "You won't find Mast on this list, either." He hands me the list from September 2019.

  "Alex, what are you getting at?"

  Next, he hands me three pieces of paper, the New York Times bestseller lists from October 2019 to December 2019. Flipping through them quickly, I see that Mast's book, A Flag of Promise, was number one on the non-fiction bestseller lists for three straight months. "Interesting," I say, not quite sure what to make of it.

  "More than interesting," Alex says. "His book is still at number one today. We have a publishing blogger at The Barker who follows this stuff closely, and she says it's nearly unprecedented. Keep in mind, Mast's book had been out more than a year already. To suddenly jump to the top of the bestseller lists and stay there is odd."

  "Well it coincides with the month Mast joined Ameritocracy. Maybe people started buying his book when they heard about him through the site."

  "That's what I thought at first." Alex rolls his chair around to my side of the desk, setting his open laptop between us. "Now I don't think so."

  He opens a spreadsheet list of our top ten candidates as of yesterday. Next to their names are the titles of their books and a couple columns of numbers. "Five of your top ten candidates have books. Robert Mast has A Flag of Promise, Tanner Futch has a series of short books on hot-button topics like immigration, Second Amendment rights, and global conspiracies."

  "And Axum has all sorts of books."

  "He does. Nine, by our account. Including the famous Civil War book and some lesser-known legal theory stuff."

  "I keep telling myself I'm going to read his Civil War book."

  "Cecilia Mason has one book, a ghost-written memoir called City Girl Rising. Wendy Kahananui has over a dozen books, the most popular is that famous one, Ten Ways to Bring Mindfulness into the Home, but she's got more, even a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Now, check out these numbers."

  He indicates two columns to the right of the book titles.

  "We used Amazon rankings to track the movement of titles after the candidates announced their campaigns. The first column is the average ranking for the month before they announced. The second column is the ranking for the month after they announced."

  Most of the books received modest increases in ranking in the month after they joined Ameritocracy, but A Flag of Promise jumped from an overall Amazon ranking of 25,733 to 18. "What does that ranking mean?"

  "It means, for that month, out of all books on Amazon, Mast's book sold better th
an all but seventeen. According to our publishing blogger, a ranking of twenty-five thousand means he was selling a few books a day on Amazon. A ranking of eighteen means thousands a day. Amazon's lists are different than The New York Times, but there is some crossover. The main point is, while other candidates' books jumped twenty to thirty percent in sales, Mast's jumped off the charts."

  I'm convinced by his numbers, but still not quite seeing the significance. "What do think is causing it?"

  "Glad you asked," Alex says with a flourish before opening a webpage. "This is a company called Non-Fiction Bestseller Strategies, Inc. They claim to help authors promote their books. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what they actually did."

  The site is plastered with marketing copy in bright yellow lettering.

  We'll get your book in the hands of industry leaders!

  Over a million social media followers!

  Guaranteed to land you on a bestseller list.

  "So what do they actually do?" I ask.

  "What they actually do is buy copies of your books to artificially inflate your numbers. You pay them, say, fifty grand, and they spend forty grand buying copies of your books, then pocket the other ten. But they don't buy them randomly. They time the purchases to have the maximum effect on the bestseller lists. It's a strategy used most frequently by business authors who are happy to lose money on a book because, once they achieve 'New York Times bestselling author' status, they can quadruple what they charge for speeches, appearances, or consulting."

  "Holy crap," I say. "I had no idea that was a thing. Is it legal?"

  "Sure is. Not ethical, of course, and it's a violation of Amazon's terms of service, but there's no law against it. The bestseller title is so valuable to some people, it's worth it."

  "You think Mast paid these guys?"

  "He didn't. It was a company called Family Media Holdings."

  "I know about FMH," I say. When I was in Seattle, I didn't mention Dawson Gadschmidt's revelation that FMH helped Mast with his ad buy, but now I tell Alex all about it.

  When I finish, Alex says, "This is starting to make a lot more sense. We've been digging into FMH for three years, quietly."

  "You mean since...that thing that happened."

  Alex looks at the floor, and I regret bringing it up. A few years back, he disappeared from the office for a week, only to return with a fantastical story about a fifty-year-old CIA hard drive that had something to do with Dewey Gunstott, FMH's CEO. Also a severe case of PTSD. I had to dye my hair for a while because he panicked if he saw a redheaded woman. Which suggests that however fantastical his story, it was no fantasy.

  I catch his eye as he looks up. "Sorry I brought it up."

  "It's fine. Anyway, we have a source in FMH. Gunstott's health is declining and he's given up day-to-day control of the company. They're still searching for a permanent CEO. Things are leaking like crazy over there as everyone scrambles for the top. I saw proof that FMH made a hundred-thousand-dollar payment to Author Bestseller Solutions on September 28, 2019."

  "Right around the time Mast announced."

  "And they paid another quarter million in November."

  "Once they saw their 'bestseller solutions' were working?"

  "Right."

  "Damn!" I walk a lap around the office, pausing at the window to watch a man push a stroller into Baker's Dozen. This is bad, but something still nags at me. "So the question is whether Mast knew." I face Alex. "Do you have people looking into it?"

  Alex gives me a look I've never seen before, one I don't understand. "That's what I'm here to tell you. We're not going to follow up on this. I came to give you this information, and to tell you in person that the ball is now in your court."

  I sit on the chair opposite him. "Why?"

  "We've only got a couple investigative guys, and my sense is this runs deep. There are a bunch of payments that looked shady, there may be a lot to this, and we don't have the resources. Plus, there's one thing you can probably do better than we can, with your information."

  "What?"

  "C'mon, Mia, there's a political campaign that's probably crooked but we can't pin it down? We all know the chorus of this song."

  "Follow the money?"

  "Ding ding ding."

  "Okay, but can you at least get me the financial records you saw?"

  "I can't."

  It's a gut punch. First he tells me he saw evidence that our top candidate is being funded by a multinational media conglomerate, then he tells me I'm on my own with the story, and now he can't share the evidence. "Why not?"

  "I don't have them. My FMH source showed them to me, but it was too risky for him to copy them. Now…"

  He trails off, and I take a moment to come to terms with the fact that he's dumping the Mast problem back in my lap. "Can I ask you about something else?"

  "The lawsuits?"

  I nod.

  "Had a hunch. Did you see the piece we ran on it?

  "I did. Thank Bird for me."

  Bird's article—"15 Crazy Election Laws That Are Still On The Books"—ran in The Barker yesterday. His way of bringing attention to the lawsuits.

  "I will," Alex says. "But what did you want to ask me?"

  "Will you do a video with me?"

  "About the lawsuits?"

  "Yeah."

  His smile is arrogant, but in this context, it's a smile I like. "I'll do better than that."

  Alex and I sit before Steph's iPhone, which is mounted on a mini tripod and broadcasting live to Ameritocracy's official Facebook page. Behind us, a red, white, and blue Ameritocracy banner reads: Democracy is Back!

  "Hello," I say to start the video. "It's Mia. You probably heard about the lawsuits filed against us. If not, I hope you'll go to our website—Ameritocracy2020.org—to read about them. We are under attack, and today I'm here to ask for your help. At the top of our homepage, just above the list of top candidates—the candidates you've come to know and love—there's a new page. I ask you to visit that page now and donate to our legal defense fund. I won't take any more of your time, but please listen for another moment to Alex Vane. He's the CEO of The Barker. Perhaps you're familiar with their listicles?"

  Alex asked Bird to tweet out a link the second it went live, and Steph did the same. As I spoke, the number of viewers on the video climbed from two thousand to five thousand to ten thousand to twenty thousand.

  Alex clears his throat as the number passes thirty thousand. "Hello Facebook-land. I'm down in Santa Clarissa, California, at the Ameritocracy office. I won't take much of your time, but I want to announce that I am personally funding the first three months of the Ameritocracy Legal Defense. That's three hundred thousand dollars." He pauses to hand me a check slowly, making sure it passes in front of the phone's camera.

  "Why am I doing this? I personally read every word of these lawsuits, and studied the case Mia made for her project at www.Ameritocracy2020.org/LegalDefense. I'm not a political guy in general, but I can't stand threats to free speech. I don't view this as a political matter. I view it as entrenched political powers—those who are supposed to defend free speech—banding together to suppress it."

  His voice wavers. He sounds genuinely angry. I know he didn't read the lawsuits, and I doubt he did more than skim the case we made on our site, but, lucky for us, he's an excellent liar.

  "I won't tolerate it," he continues. "A free society won't allow speech to be stifled by an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits. So I'm taking action against it. Will you do the same?"

  We now have over a hundred thousand viewers. I glance at my laptop, open to our Legal Defense Fund page. Four thousand dollars have come in, then five, then a sudden jump to eleven thousand.

  Alex is warmed up now, hitting his stride. "I've been lucky enough to operate in a political and legal landscape that allowed me to create The Barker. We've done some good work and, admittedly, we've published our share of crap. But it's not up to the entrenched political powers to decide what's
crap and what isn't. It's not up to Washington D.C. to tell us what we can and can't publish. By the same token, it shouldn't be up to them to tell Mia, to tell Ameritocracy, to tell America who can run for president. Make no mistake about it, that's precisely what these lawsuits are designed to do."

  My eyes are glazed over, half in awe at Alex's sincere-sounding fire on an argument I think he only barely believes, half because the numbers on our donation page are bonkers. In addition to Alex's three hundred grand, we've already received pledges for forty thousand a month.

  12

  Steph rides shotgun as I cruise toward the Colton Industries Campus, top down, in the warm winter night.

  "I can't get over the weather," she says.

  "Right? Why didn't we move here sooner?"

  "Because you're sleeping on a bed in the office and I'm dipping into my savings just to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment."

  I slow as the security guard waves me through the gate. "Good point." I stop in front of Building 3, a square glass and steel construction that holds a huge meeting room used for Peter's monthly all-staff meetings. Today it hosts a nineties-themed party that promises to be the biggest yet.

  A low baseline wafts through the night air as we make our way into the building. About twenty feet from the door, which is surrounded by balloons, a giant banner reads: Colton Industries, 94307. Music pours from the hall. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," by Aerosmith.

  "Oh no," Steph says. "Tell me this won't be a cheesy only-nineties-kids-remember thing. Please, tell me that. I mean, I thought it would be more Outkast, less whatever this is."

  "You sure you want to go in?" Before she can answer, I say, "Malcolm is DJing later, assuming he hasn't gotten too famous and ditched us. When you know the DJ, you can make requests."

  "Yeah, I'll go. We did get all dressed up."

  Steph and I spent the early evening recreating the outfits of Alicia Silverstone and Staci Dash from Clueless, which is to say, we both look smoking hot in an overdone, ridiculous way.

  Steph wears a plaid skirt suit that stops a couple inches above the knee, with black knee-high socks, shiny black Mary Janes, and a hat that looks way too much like a black-and-white lampshade. I'm in a tight-fitting red cocktail dress and 3-inch red heels, my only accessory a fluffy white scarf made of costume feathers.