Pebble Mine is an opportunity to tap into The Last Frontier’s vast abundance, bringing much-needed prosperity to the state, as well as American mineral independence from countries like communist China that have gruesome environmental records. It’s a decision Alaskans—not wealthy Beltway activists—need to make, but in January 2023, the Biden administration had the Environmental Protection Agency take what even the Associated Press called, “an unusually strong step” to block the mine, a step others called legally indefensible.97 The project at this writing remains mired in red tape and litigation.

  “Dark Money” behind “Electrification”

  Another environmental incursion undertaken by the Democrats during the Biden administration—and generously funded with Arabella dollars—is directed at something disarmingly called “electrification.” It may sound innocuous, but it is strongly anti-consumer, and along with other major players in “green” left-wing politics, Arabella Advisors is behind this campaign to cut off every house in America from natural gas and make Americans dependent on electric-only appliances. The campaign is run through Rewiring America, which itself is powered by Arabella’s Windward Fund.98

  Rewiring America—which has received at least $300,000 from the left-wing Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2020—wants to weaponize the federal budget to subsidize construction of “electrified” houses (including special wiring and electric-only appliances), and pushing “loan-loss guarantees” and “direct assistance to low-to-moderate income households, including renters” to advance its agenda.99 In other words, it’s advocating classic command and control policies that would redistribute wealth to preferred groups and force top-down housing policies on communities.

  Soon after the Biden administration moved in, Democrats began pushing their climate bill, the Build Green Act—a $500 billion plan to fight “environmental racism.” The legislation included a call for the country to shift entirely to renewable energy and to replace all vehicles with electric cars. Rewiring America praised the legislation for “decarbonizing our economy and meeting the climate challenge.”

  Many of the bill’s provisions, however, were not even related to the climate or the environment. The legislation would redistribute wealth to low-income and minority communities, as well as communities “facing environmental injustice.” It would also institute “strong labor provisions” for union workers and establish a $15-per-hour minimum wage.100

  Liberals frequently use “environmental racism” to justify a host of radical policies. The bill’s sponsors claim that “environmental racism” justifies everything from racial reparations payments to single-payer health care. The left-wing Sunrise Movement, which endorsed the legislation, supports abolishing “police and prisons” in order to achieve “climate justice.”101

  President Joe Biden himself invoked “environmental justice” on the campaign trail, calling to have the Justice Department prosecute fossil fuel companies “to the fullest extent permitted by law.”102 The legislation was endorsed by left-wing groups like 350.org, Greenpeace, and Zero Hour, which claims the world has less than nine years left until it’s made uninhabitable by global warming.103

  In January 2021, the Windward Fund hired AJW Inc., which lobbies for environmental groups including the Clean Air Task Force and the Environmental Defense Action Fund.104 After months of legislative debate and negotiation, many elements of the original Build Green bill (combined with Biden’s touted “Build Back Better” framework) were included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021.

  Electrification Rejects What Already Works

  Electrification’s stated goal is to ward off climate change by minimizing natural gas use. But natural gas is among the least carbon dioxide–intensive energy sources in the world. Increased use of natural gas has lowered the U.S. carbon dioxide emissions over the past few years, far beyond the reductions in most industrialized countries, as the United States switches from oil to cheaper gas—a benefit of the fracking revolution so hated by the Left.

  Even the United Nations recently credited rapidly falling U.S. emissions to this widespread adoption of natural gas—after President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement—which ironically enabled the United States to meet 2020 emissions reduction targets.105 Yet the sprint to electrification continued to intensify. Rewiring America’s June 2021 report detailed the “One Billion Machines” required to reach net zero emissions in time for the United States to comply with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global warming goals. The machines identified ranged from space and water heaters to vehicles to cooking appliances.

  When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Iija) passed in late 2021, Ari Matusiak, the CEO of Rewiring America applauded the legislation while acknowledging that “much must still be done to decarbonize the supply side of our energy sector.” He continued, “Our mission in the year and change that Rewiring America has existed has been to electrify everything, starting with our homes, in a way that helps all Americans.” Then, the organization and over sixty left-wing groups hailed the August 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and its $391 billion in spending on energy and climate change to “decarbonize our buildings and homes.”

  Fast forward to January 2023, when Richard J. Trumka, a U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner, stated in an interview with Bloomberg that gas stoves were a safety hazard and banning them could be an option (based on a study by another electrification advocacy group, the Rocky Mountain Institute).106 The backlash from consumers was so fierce that Trumka walked back his comments within three days. Corporate media rushed to the Biden administration’s defense, epitomized by this dishonest headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Calm Down, the Government Isn’t Coming for Your Gas Stove.”107 Or Rolling Stone’s “No, the Government Is Not Seizing Your Gas Stove.”108 Yet the “decarbonation” activism of Arabella’s Rewiring America and similar groups stands in stark contrast to the media’s claims, giving an entirely new definition to the term, “gaslighting.”

  In March 2023, Renewing America announced that failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams would become its senior counsel and launch an awareness campaign to help America go electric.

  And in one more contradiction of the media’s claims that activists aren’t aiming to overturn Americans’ lives, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the state’s fiscal year 2024 budget—including a ban on the use of natural gas in new building construction as soon as 2025.

  Arabella’s Origins Conveyed Its Future Agenda

  It’s not surprising that environmental issues have garnered such attention over the years from Arabella Advisors and its nonprofits, given how closely Eric Kessler’s early career arc tracked with environmentalist schemes. After all, he started out with the League of Conservation Voters and followed its head to Clinton’s Department of the Interior. As we have seen, he now maintains close ties with Biden’s Interior appointees.

  Wherever the Left builds up government power and assaults the liberties and way of life of ordinary Americans, there you will find Arabella, its donors, and its activists. Of course, this requires considerable efforts at propaganda, which we will explore in the next chapter.

  7

  CASE STUDY

  The Hub Project

  How a Foreign Billionaire Uses Front Groups to Intervene in Elections

  IT’S A STORY that goes to the very heart of the Left’s mountain of shadowy funding and professional activism: a foreign billionaire infamous for illegally funding Democrats, enriched by selling ghoulish medical treatments that resulted in multiple deaths, and bankrolling a multimillion-dollar “dark money” campaign to transform America.

  Meet Swiss-born Hansjörg Wyss (pronounced “Hans-yurg Veese”), perhaps the most important mega-donor you’ve never heard of. His Wyss Foundation, founded in 1998, quietly commands a stunning $2.7 billion in assets (as of 2021) and annually pours out tens of millions of dollars to activist groups—around a billion dollars between 2002 and 2021—so it’s little wonder he’s been called the “new George Soros.”1

  Wyss is one of the best-connected mega-donors on the left. He’s a member of the Democracy Alliance, a cabal of the rich and powerful that meets regularly to strategize funding to leftist activists (see chapter 9).2 He’s also a substantial contributor to and sits on the board of the Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank founded by John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.3 Podesta has reportedly advised Wyss on his funding of public policy efforts, and Podesta and Wyss Foundation president Molly McUsic have collaborated on stealthy nonprofit schemes to win elections for the Democratic Party.4

  To the degree Wyss is known, it’s for his contributions to green groups, such as the Wilderness Society, where he sits on the board along with top lieutenant, McUsic.5 In the past two decades Wyss has made substantial contributions to environmental groups on the center-left and far-left, including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Trout Unlimited, National Religious Partnership for the Environment, and Natural Resources Defense Council.6

  But his money extends beyond environmental advocacy. For years Wyss has backed groups involved in getting out the vote for Democratic politicians, such as the League of Conservation Voters, Environment America, and even the infamous ACORN successor group Project Vote (defunct since 2017).7

  This brand of “philanthropy” has made this billionaire a hero to the same Northeastern Corridor liberals who loathe the very idea of billionaires and who howled over foreign meddling in U.S. politics for years after the 2016 election. But the Left’s hypocrisy aside, Wyss is the wrong horse to back.

  He’s declined to tell even the New York Times whether he holds U.S. citizenship and as recently as 2014 stated that he does not hold a green card granting permanent residency—and the legal ability to donate to U.S. election campaigns.8 In 2016 Wyss got into trouble when it was revealed he had contributed $41,000 to Democratic political action committees (PACs) in violation of the federal government’s strict ban on foreign nationals giving to U.S. political campaigns.9 Since 2018, this foreign national has also donated at least $1 million through his foundation to States Newsroom, a bundle of partisan attack sites posing as impartial news outlets but actually spawned by Arabella Advisors.10

  So it was refreshing in April 2022, when a New York Times reporter revealed Wyss’s efforts to purchase the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and other failing newspapers around the country for $100 million.11 This reporter’s display of genuine investigative journalism came at a time when so many were busy framing Wyss as a liberal white knight bent on saving a venerable American industry.12

  It’s worth recalling that same crowd’s horror when the libertarian Koch brothers announced they were considering buying the same parent company in 2013: It could “serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissezfaire ideas,” insisted the Gray Lady; could help the brothers “take on media reports they dispute,” groaned the Washington Post; and could even “spark [a] ‘culture clash,’” warned National Public Radio.13

  Mute liberals probably played no role in Wyss’s rapid change of heart when—just days after the Times’ exposé—he quietly withdrew his bid for the newspapers, supposedly after reevaluating the Chicago Tribune’s financial troubles.14

  The eighty-eight-year-old Wyss will probably never achieve his goal of becoming a media mogul. His true legacy will be constructing a key “dark money” group created to help Democrats win elections and enact policy, situated within Arabella’s multibillion-dollar network.

  No Love for the Limelight

  Hansjörg Wyss is famously secretive. The few public interviews he’s given largely concern the environment and his deep interest in conservation, prime targets for his giving.

  The future Swiss billionaire first came to the United States as a graduate student in 1958 and took a job as a surveyor for the Colorado Highway Department. The Rocky Mountains reminded him of the Swiss Alps, he explained in 2017, and he was particularly impressed with America’s system of national parks compared with Europe’s, where many natural areas are “privately owned, developed, or otherwise off-limits to the public.”15 Besides environmental activism, Wyss funds genuine philanthropy and is a major donor to universities, including Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.16

  Wyss made his fortune as the head of Synthes USA, a major medical implants and biomaterials manufacturer that he built from practically nothing and sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for $19.7 billion. Today, Wyss is worth an estimated $9.4 billion.17

  Yet his success is marred by the macabre. In 2009, Synthes—with Wyss at its head—was charged by Philadelphia’s U.S. attorney with running illegal clinical trials on humans: injecting them with a cement that turns to bone inside the human skeleton. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly told the company not to use the cement during spine surgeries, but Synthes ignored the warning, and five people died as a result. Four of Synthes’s top executives were ultimately sentenced to prison. One wonders if liberal billionaire privilege saved Wyss from sharing the blame—he wasn’t charged by prosecutors—since he’s been accused of purposefully ignoring clinical trials and of being a “hands-on,” “forceful,” “800-pound gorilla” who allowed little dissent in the ranks.18

  Add to that allegations of sexual assault in 2011 leveled against Wyss by a female former employee in New Jersey in late 2017, while the pair were staying at a hotel in Morris County.19 It’s unclear how the case was resolved.

  Whatever the truth may be, it’s hard to shake the sense that Wyss is both a genuine conservationist and a liberal technocrat, using his vast wealth to try to control a country to which he refuses allegiance. Nothing better illustrates Wyss’s brand of paternalism than his longstanding relationship with the largest “dark money” network in politics.

  The Hub Project: Born in “Dark Money”

  The story begins in 2015, when the consulting firm Civitas Public Affairs Group—whose clients include the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign and the Voter Participation Center, a Democratic get-out-the-vote “charity”—produced a private report for the Wyss Foundation outlining a plan for a “communications hub.”20 (It’s unknown exactly how much the foundation paid for the report, but from 2015 to 2018 it paid over $442,000 to Civitas.)

  Seventeen members of the professional Left were interviewed for the report, representing such groups as Pew Charitable Trusts, the attack group Media Matters for America, the Center for American Progress (where Wyss is a board member), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), abortion giant NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Brennan Center, and the Center for Popular Democracy (famous for assaulting Arizona Republican senator Jeff Flake in an elevator during a Supreme Court nomination battle).21

  This hub would support the foundation’s “core issue areas,” creating “research-based message frames” to “drive measurable change” and achieve “significant wins,” which in turn would “dramatically shift the public debate and policy positions of core decision makers,” “leading to implementation of policy solutions at the local, state, and federal level.” In other words, it would elect Democrats and make public policy.

  The IRS strictly prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits from contributing to or intervening in political campaigns “on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate,” period.22 Foundations, which fall under the 501(c)(3) rules, are subject to even stricter rules concerning funding of voter registration and lobbying activity than 501(c)(3) charities.23

  From the start, the hub was “solely funded by the Wyss Foundation,” yet its ties to the foundation were intentionally hidden. The Civitas report even recommends it be dissociated from the Wyss Foundation so as to “give the foundation appropriate separation from the hub’s work” and “allow the hub to engage in a more robust way than it could if it was based within the foundation.” In other words, the hub was designed to be hidden, precisely to allow the foundation to bypass the IRS prohibition on intervening in elections.

  Instead, the hub would be set up as an “independent organization with a fiscal sponsor.” Its advisory board would consist of Wyss Foundation officials, who would receive quarterly reports on its progress. These arrangements made the hub a front group for an established liberal nonprofit that specializes in incubating new advocacy groups. That sponsor, the plan explains, would need to have the “flexibility to work across the spectrum of 501(c)(3), (h) election, and 501(c)(4) activities”—references to the lobbying caps the IRS places on different kinds of nonprofits. And the sponsor would need to set aside “15 to 25 percent of the budget for (c)(4) work funded by The Wyss Action Fund” (more on that later).

  Not many fiscal sponsors fit that description in 2015. One stands out: Arabella Advisors, the then obscure consultancy whose network of (then) four in-house nonprofits already commanded a staggering $332 million in revenues in 2015 alone.24

  As we’ve explained earlier, each of these nonprofits manages a host of “pop-up” groups, websites designed to fool viewers into believing they’re grassroots activist groups. The New Venture Fund alone claims to have launched close to 500 “projects,” with more appearing all the time.

  So it isn’t difficult to guess the kind of results the Wyss Foundation expected when it began funneling millions of dollars ($57 million from 2007 to 2020) into the New Venture Fund, Arabella’s flagship 501(c)(3) “charity.”25

  The “communications hub” described in the 2015 Civitas report is strikingly similar to an existing Arabella group launched in January 2017—the Hub Project.26 The Hub Project consists of two organizations: an action arm fronting for the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Arabella’s 501(c)(4) lobbying wing, and a research arm fronting for the “charity” New Venture Fund.27 Many of Arabella’s groups use this kind of pairing scheme, maximizing their respective tax status advantages for lobbying and fundraising.