Sam Brown cancels campaign visit to Elko for Bitcoin conference in Nashville • Nevada Current

Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sam Brown was scheduled to speak in Elko Saturday, part of his campaign’s “Rural Tour.”

But the “Rural Tour” campaign stop was canceled due to, as the Elko County Republican Party put it on social media, “unintended circumstances.”

The unintended circumstances, it turns out, is a cryptocurrency conference in Tennessee. Instead of Elko on Saturday, Brown is now scheduled to be in Nashville to attend “Bitcoin24,” where he will participate in a half-hour early morning panel titled “Bitcoin as a winning political strategy.”

The conference’s main event will be remarks from none other than Donald Trump. His rants generally don’t mention crypto. But they are invariably cryptic, so close enough.

Joining Brown on the Saturday morning panel will be fellow Republican Senate hopefuls Bernie Moreno of Ohio and John Deaton of Massachusetts. 

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott, earlier this summer considered a possible vice presidential pick on the Republican ticket, will also be on the morning panel with Brown, as will David McIntosh, a former Republican member of Congress and the president of the Republican-aligned Club for Growth Super PAC.

Other headliners at the event  include presidential candidate and profound quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., celebrated whistleblower/classified documents leaker Edwin Snowden, the once sometimes amusing now avoid-at-all-costs media personality Russell Brand, and that new Sham-wow guy, Vivek Ramaswamy.

Charming and evocative as they are, the exhibits at Elko’s Cowboy Arts and Gear Museum evidently don’t interest Brown as much as a star-studded lineup of figures idolized by your contemporary neo-libertartian-cum-authoritarian tech bro crowd. 

And neither, apparently, do Elko County voters.

But then, neither Elko’s museum nor its voters are spending more than $100 million to elect people to Congress who will coddle the crypto industry.

Housetraining members of Congress

Crypto’s bid for control of Congress is already going rather well.

In the current Congress, crypto bros ordered their pet elected officials to introduce legislation to shield the industry from the same regulatory requirements – and consumer protections – that apply to other forms of financial investments.

Many leading cryptocurrency firms “have shown their unwillingness to comply with applicable laws and regulations for more than a decade, variously arguing that the laws do not apply to them or that a new set of rules should be created and retroactively applied to them to excuse their past conduct,” wrote Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler in a statement unloading on the bill.

“Widespread noncompliance,” Gensler continued, “has resulted in widespread fraud, bankruptcies, failures, and misconduct. As a result of criminal charges and convictions, some of the best-known leaders in the crypto industry are now in prison, awaiting sentencing, or subject to extradition back to the United States.”

The risk of excluding cryptocurrency from security laws, Gensler added, is not confined to crypto currency buyers and traders, but could spill over to “undermine the broader $100 trillion capital markets.”

That’d be your global financial meltdown.

Nevada having been ground zero for the last financial crisis caused by wild-eyed deregulation of segments of the financial services industry, you’d think Nevada elected officials in particular would be awfully wary of giving unregulated carte blanche to yet more exotic investment instrument chicanery that already claims a relatively brief but rich history of rampant fraudulent jiggery-pokery. 

You would be wrong. 

In May, the House passed the crypto-crafted legislation, and every member of the House from Nevada – the three Democrats and the one Republican – voted for it.

Though the legislation also enjoys broad bipartisan support in the Senate, it has stalled there, for now (thanks, Elizabeth Warren). 

A crypto industry-backed effort to scrub an SEC accounting rule has also enjoyed bipartisan support, with resolutions passed by both chambers earlier this year. In the Senate, Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto voted against it, but Brown’s general election opponent, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, voted for it.

Biden vetoed it, and the House upheld his veto. Mirroring the Nevada House delegation’s votes on initial passage of the bill, the state’s three Democratic House members voted with Biden, while Republican Rep. Mark Amodei voted to override the veto. But the crypto industry hasn’t given up on overturning, or at the least weakening, the accounting rule.

While the industry has clearly made bipartisan progress on housetraining Congress, one investment firm that specializes in cryptocurrency, Multicoin, is working with a right-wing Super PAC to specifically back Brown, Moreno, and Republican Senate candidates in Montana and Pennsylvania.

Multicoin wants to flip the Senate to Republican control so as to “shift the balance of power in agency appointments and other key areas where crypto companies intersect with the federal government, such as the courts,” according to reporting from CoinDesk, a trade journal that focuses on cryptocurrency.

Great. Fealty to a useless industry riddled with corruption sounds like the exactly the sort of thing at which our contemporary dystopian Trump-McConnell-Kafka courts are prepared to excel. (Clarence Thomas is probably already shopping for a second luxury Winnebago). And of course nobody knows how to empower and enable dystopian courts that make pernicious decisions like Republican U.S. senators. Well, them and Trump.

(As an aside… cryptocurrency “mining,” by one analysis, requires the same amount of electricity as that used by all the lighting and refrigerators in U.S. homes. That may help explain Nevada bipartisan support for the industry – the word “mining” is guaranteed to trigger Pavlovian approval from Nevada elected officials.)

Anyway, Brown obviously isn’t the only Nevada politician who’s fond of the cryptocurrency industry.

And Brown is also fond of Elko.

“Our campaign is immensely proud of our strong base of supporters in Elko,” Kristy Wilkinson, the campaign’s communication director, said in a statement when asked about Brown skipping Elko for crypto. Brown was in Elko earlier this month for a rodeo, Wilkinson noted.

“Our campaign looks forward to hosting another event there very soon,” she added.

Elko is a Republican stronghold, and Brown needs to run up the vote in places that aren’t Clark and Washoe counties. Of course he’ll be campaigning in Elko again.

But not this Saturday. He’s too busy bonding with crypto bros. Oh, and Trump, if he’s lucky.