Hours after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in July 2018, a well-funded non-tax-exempt entity called “Demand Justice” popped up denouncing potential Trump nominees to the court, including Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Barrett.
Demand Justice is one of the many tentacles of the leftist leviathan, Arabella Advisors LLC, a for-profit consulting firm.
Arabella, which The New York Times has warned is “an opaque network that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and Progressive causes,” is the subject of an intriguing new book, Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America by Scott Walter.
Walter, the president of Capital Research Center (CRC), a “philanthropic watchdog” think tank, has done an impressive job of unearthing how Arabella covertly developed the darkest of all “dark money networks that shapes political races and public policy on abortion, environmentalism, Federal regulations, healthcare, election laws, and much more.”
Arabella, founded by former Clinton administration staffer and trust fund baby, Eric Kessler, is a philanthropic “inner beltway” consulting firm that caters to major progressive donors including George Soros’s Open Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
Arabella Advisors, which is owned by Arabella Acquisition LLC, operates five tax-exempt entities: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund and North Fund. All the funds have interlocking officers, most at the same corporate address, and have management contracts with Arabella Advisors.
The in-house nonprofits, Walter notes, “provides a powerful advantage to big dollar donors.” To achieve donor intent, they can instantly create pop-up groups.
But what is most interesting is that “those groups can only be traced back to one of the in-house nonprofits.” Hence, no one knows who funds a particular cause.
The Arabella pyramid enables donors to not only get a tax deduction but “to fund the ‘progressive’ political causes they want without being seen wading into grubby activism.”
In 2018, Arabella-controlled nonprofits took in $1.2 billion, and in the 2020 election cycle, a staggering $2.4 billion. It raised a billion more than the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee combined.
Between 2005, the year Arabella was founded, and 2021, its nonprofit empire took in over $6.5 billion.
Here are a few of the top nonprofit donors to Arabella’s leviathan that CRC has been able to identify:
- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the largest donor, handing over $456 million since 2008, including $127 million in 2020 alone.
- The Ford Foundation contributed $25 million in 2020.
- The Buffet Foundation contributed $20 million in 2020.
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation contributed $20 million in 2020.
- The W.K. Kellogg Foundation contributed $9.5 million in 2020.
- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation contributed $18.6 million in 2020.
And CRC discovered that in 2021, The Silicon Valley Community Foundation donated $119 million to the Arabella network and The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund forked over $106 million.
Since inception, Arabella’s nonprofits have paid out nearly $5 billion on so-called “education and advocacy” issues. The network, Walter concludes, “is nothing if not a gigantic money-laundering machine for left-wing mega donors.”
While Arabella claims its donors sponsor “philanthropic not political” causes, Walter notes “its definition of ‘charity’ nearly always involves changing public policy.” Arabella “provides a model of how to push every edge of the legal envelope in order to secure political victories by blending nonprofits and for-profits.”
Arabella’s chief executive officer, Sampriti Ganguli, confirmed Walter’s claim when he said in a Chronicles of Philanthropy interview: “Now, from my perspective, what I would say is: these platforms are really solving for an end — I don’t want to say an end run — but they’re a work-around to the tax regime.”
That attitude helps explain why The Atlantic called Arabella “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.”
Walter also includes in his book eight “Case Studies” that describe how Arabella’s advocacy groups shape the political landscape.
“Each case study exposes different components of how the ‘dark money’ empire operates highlighting the aggressive and deceptive tactics used as it serves Warren Buffett’s abortion agenda, Mark Zuckerberg’s election meddling, a foreign billionaire’s political interventions, and the collaboration among billionaires and centimillionaires in George Soros’s Democracy Alliance.”
Scott Walter and his CRC colleagues have performed a great service. By cutting through the camouflage and propaganda they have revealed how elitist progressive mega-donors are gaming the tax system to impose on the nation their ideological rubrics.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.