$500,000 for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections Action Fund, which works with the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the other “charity” that distributed the partisan “Zuck Bucks” grants in the 2020 election;38

  $1,680,000 for the Trusted Elections Action Fund, set up to stop “viral misinformation” and “post–Election Day violence” by angry Trump supporters (a Democracy Fund representative also sits on the group’s steering committee);39 and

  $132,000 for Co-Equal, an Arabella-run campaign to privately fund lawyers to help House Democratic climate campaigns, an arrangement that breaks congressional ethics rules.40

  It’s the same story with grants from the Omidyar Network Fund and Democracy Fund to Arabella-run nonprofits in recent years:

  $3,000,000 to the Tipping Point Fund, which repackages grants and funnels them to public policy advocacy groups focused on “social justice”;41

  $1,500,000 for Democracy Docket Legal Fund, founded by partisan superlawyer Marc Elias to help Democrats by such efforts as challenging Republican-drawn redistricting maps and locking in Democrats’ own favorable congressional maps;42

  $700,000 for the Trusted Elections Fund, the (c)(3) “charitable” arm of Trusted Elections Action Fund;43 and

  $1,250,000 for the 2020 Census Project, a mysterious pooled fund to influence Census turnout in Democratic-controlled states, in hopes of boosting their electoral college votes and the federal spending sent there.44

  Readers will learn more about Omidyar’s collaboration with Arabella leading up to and including the 2020 election in chapters 4 and 7.

  Arabella’s Progeny: How Much Do They Spend?

  Since they were launched, Arabella’s nonprofits have paid out close to $5 billion in issue education and advocacy—the network is nothing if not a gigantic money-laundering machine for left-wing megadonors. Let’s fill in some numbers for spending by Arabella’s progeny over time.

  THE NEW VENTURE FUND (the largest of the groups) has been the biggest spender, with a total of $3.1 billion since 2006. Growth was steady; it took just three years for the group to spend over $10 million in one year, then just another five years before it spent well over $100 million. Starting in 2018, New Venture has spent roughly $500 million per year in its education and issue advocacy efforts, reaching nearly $659 million in spending in 2020 before declining—for the first time in its history—to $552.5 million in 2021. Of course, this just shows how political the Arabella network actually is. Note that there was significantly more activity during the 2020 presidential and congressional election year than there was in 2021, when there were fewer big races. The odds are good that Arabella again spent more in 2022, but as usual the Arabella in-house nonprofits are waiting until the last legally possible minute to disclose their 2022 data.

  THE SIXTEEN THIRTY FUND, which spends cash on a combination of education, lobbying, and campaign ads, has spent just under $1 billion since its 2009 inception. Spending fluctuates more dramatically for Sixteen Thirty than for New Venture, with higher spending levels coinciding with election years. For example, Sixteen Thirty spent nearly $47 million in 2017 and almost $99 million in 2019, compared to $141 million in 2018 and $410 million in 2020. In addition to unlimited lobbying, 501(c)(4) organizations may spend a limited amount on influencing the outcome of elections (usually by running ads supporting or opposing candidates for public office). While that type of election intervention was always allowed to some degree by IRS regulations, in the last few years the IRS clarified that at least 51 percent of a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group’s expenses should go toward lobbying and education, while no more than 49 percent should go toward campaign spending.

  Total Arabella Entity Revenues Over Time

  THE HOPEWELL FUND has spent just under $473 million since it launched in 2015. Starting in 2019, the organization has averaged expenses of around $120 million annually.

  THE WINDWARD FUND, the smallest of the (c)(3) charity sisters, has logged just $231 million in expenses since its founding in 2015, although nearly half its spending (46 percent, or $107 million) occurred in 2021 alone, so more growth is likely.

  THE NORTH FUND only came into existence in 2019 with all its funding coming from Arabella’s other (c)(4) group, Sixteen Thirty Fund. But it maximized its donor engagement quickly: In just three years (2019–2021) North Fund spent over $84 million. It took the Sixteen Thirty Fund over eight years to hit that spending threshold. In 2020 alone, North Fund gave $500,000 to the network’s biggest 501(c)(3), New Venture Fund, which gave $11 million back to North Fund. Similarly, in 2021, Sixteen Thirty Fund donated $1.9 million to North Fund; North Fund then gave $1.4 million back to Sixteen Thirty.

  Indeed, the five funds regularly shuffle tens of millions of dollars around the network. For example, New Venture granted $2.3 million to Hopewell and almost $27 million to Sixteen Thirty in 2018. The reasons behind this funding merry-go-round are inscrutable, but the vague grant descriptions suggest political activism and issue advocacy. The 2018 New Venture grant to Hopewell was for “civil rights, social action, advocacy,” while New Venture’s grant to Sixteen Thirty simply says it’s for “capacity building.” (Significantly, the latter grant made New Venture the second-largest donor to Sixteen Thirty in 2018. The fact that Sixteen Thirty didn’t disclose the grant’s source—New Venture—spurred the Washington Post editorial board to express angst over left-wing “dark money.”)45 Grants were made to the same organizations in 2021 ($390,000 to Hopewell; $27.3 million to Sixteen Thirty), both were for “civil rights, social action, advocacy.”46

  Total Arabella Entity Expenditures Over Time

  One likely explanation for some of the tens of millions of dollars flowing from New Venture to Sixteen Thirty: As a 501(c)(3), New Venture can provide individuals with a tax deduction that the same donors could not receive if they wrote checks directly to Sixteen Thirty, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Foundations also much prefer to give to a (c)(3) rather than a (c)(4), because giving to a (c)(3) is less likely to draw ire from both IRS auditors and nonprofit watchdogs. Too bad the mainstream media—usually keen to criticize 501(c)(4) “dark money groups”—have failed to ask Sixteen Thirty whether the massive “donations” it receives from New Venture are designed to grant donors both anonymity (“darkness”) and tax advantages for their political giving.

  Arabella Management Fees Over Time

  Philanthropy or Politics?

  To be fair, not all of the Arabella network’s grants go to explicitly left-wing or even political organizations. And Arabella stresses its clients’ “ideological diversity,” to quote a recent glowing profile it received from the left-leaning Inside Philanthropy. “Because its work is so varied,” the publication reports, “Arabella doesn’t position itself in the ideologically pointed terms of some of its peers.” Of course, Arabella’s “positioning” may stem from a lack of harsh ideology, or it may just reflect the savvy of a Beltway bandit operation hiding its true colors.

  The company itself has tried to deflect scrutiny by claiming the activism it sponsors is philanthropic, not political, yet its definition of “charity” nearly always involves changing public policy. In this way the Arabella empire provides a model of how to push every edge of the legal envelope in order to score political victories by blending nonprofits and for-profits. Arabella tweeted on January 7, 2020: “by establishing [for-profit] LLCs as their philanthropies’ primary home and partnering with 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) intermediaries, philanthropists can support more political activities and better achieve meaningful policy change.”

  That tweet linked to an Arabella blog post entitled, “Four Promising Practices for Philanthropies to Advance Advocacy and Policy Change.”47 There Arabella reported on a phenomenon it no doubt hoped to encourage, both to enrich its own coffers and to advance its political ideology: “Philanthropists are increasingly willing to spend on lobbying and elections and are creating institutional structures that allow them to do so.” This is politics by another name.

  The politics-without-shame approach to “charity” was pushed even harder in Arabella CEO Sampriti Ganguli’s March 2020 interview with the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the premier philanthropy news outlet. Ganguli gushed over her clients’ political spending—and how her company helps them bypass those pesky IRS funding restrictions:

  people are thinking about social enterprises and nonprofits interchangeably, and on the nonprofit side, nonprofits are thinking about earned revenue models. So those traditional silos between grantee and grantor are really blurring, and you’re seeing an explosion, a blossoming of a lot of these platforms. 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. Structurally, it might be worthwhile to think differently about the tax regime, but nonetheless, these platforms are an evolution of some of the constraints that have been put on these respective platforms, if you will, or respective charitable vehicles [emphasis added].48

  One wonders what liberal critics of money in politics would say if Arabella were offering conservative donors a “work-around to the tax regime.”

  Again, sometimes its clients use the company’s nonprofits to support genuinely charitable causes. In 2018, for example, New Venture donated to Akeela, a substance-abuse and mental health nonprofit in Alaska. But only a few charitable grants are at the business end of Arabella’s “dark money” pipeline.

  And that’s not surprising given the number of New Venture Fund board members tied to major left-wing funders, including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Hattaway Communications (a for-profit firm whose clients include numerous Sixteen Thirty Fund projects), and the left-leaning think tank Center for Global Development, co-founded by ex-Obama administration official Brian Deese (creator of the infamous Cash for Clunkers car buyback program). The board members of the other groups have similar interests and pedigrees.

  So aside from a relatively few grants that the outside observer would deem charitable, the rest fund the Left’s bread-and-butter political groups. Just consider the organizations receiving more than $15 million in grants starting in 2019.

  New Venture Fund’s Top Grantees Since 2019

  2019

  2020

  2021

  Total

  Sixteen Thirty Fund

  $33,013,025

  $86,234,295

  $27,270,554

  $146,517,874

  America Votes

  $2,192,266

  $44,261,222

  $7,092,436

  $53,545,924

  Center for Technology and Civic Life

  $166,400

  $24,829,000

  $24,995,400

  North Fund

  $11,171,248

  $12,870,870

  $24,042,118

  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

  $15,802,170

  $15,802,170

  Ignoring the $170 million given to other Arabella entities, over $75 million went to both America Votes and the Center for Technology and Civic Life. America Votes is a thinly veiled get-out-the-vote operation for Democrats, created in the wake of President Bush’s reelection in 2004 by Clinton official Harold Ickes, SEIU president Andy Stern, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, EMILY’s List founder Ellen Malcolm, and Partnership for America’s Families president Steve Rosenthal.49 The Center for Technology and Civic Life, led by Democratic voter organizing expert and Obama Foundation Fellow Tiana Epps-Johnson, was the major group behind “Zuck Bucks.”50

  Sixteen Thirty Fund’s Top Grantees Since 2019

  2019

  2020

  2021

  Total

  America Votes

  $7,060,000

  $128,976,147

  $1,525,000

  $137,561,147

  North Fund

  $9,300,500

  $19,390,584

  $1,136,250

  $29,827,334

  League of Conservation Voters

  $166,400

  $24,829,000

  $24,995,400

  Future Forward USA Action*

  $15,232,000

  $15,232,000

  Advancing AZ

  $3,950,000

  $2,477,000

  $8,750,000

  $15,177,000

  Defending Democracy Together

  $10,050,000

  $500,000

  $10,550,000

  * Sixteen Thirty Fund also provided $8.9 million to the Future Forward USA PAC (in a 2019 grant of $1.4 million and a 2020 grant of $7.5 million), so the total given to the Future Forward USA entities was $24,147,274.

  America Votes, as noted when it was discussed under New Venture Fund grantees, works to turn out Democratic voters in elections. Its $129 million grant from Sixteen Thirty in 2020 more than doubled the group’s entire 2019 budget, and its harsh tactics aimed at forcing Democrats to vote have drawn criticism from some allies on the Left.51 Future Forward USA Action is the 501(c)(4) “dark money” group that funnels cash to the Joe Biden–supporting Future Forward PAC; this camouflaging of PAC money has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics.52 Advancing Arizona is, Politico reports, a “Democratic dark money organization.”53 Defending Democracy Together is a never-Trump political effort headed by former conservative activist Bill Kristol.54

  Hopewell Fund’s Top Grantees

  2019

  2020

  2021

  Total

  California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls

  $10,290,000

  $10,290,000

  Sixteen Thirty Fund

  $3,060,248

  $3,827,001

  $3,087,645

  $9,974,894

  ACRONYM

  $8,078,980

  $615,260

  $8,694,240

  Salk Institute for Biological Studies

  $8,359,623

  $8,359,623

  The Nature Conservancy

  $6,378,340

  $6,378,340

  The California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls was created by the state’s legislature “to promote equality and justice for all women and girls by advocating on their behalf with the Governor, the Legislature and other public policymakers, and by educating the public.”55 ACRONYM mobilizes voters and churns out advocacy campaigns for various Democratic candidates and causes. It also “controls a number of for-profit companies that are major players in Democratic Party politics, including campaign consulting firm Lockwood Strategy, a peer-to-peer political technology company known as Shadow, and a media company that invests in local left-leaning news outlets called Fwiw Media.”56 The Salk Institute conducts research not just in medical areas but also climate change.57

  Windward Fund’s Top Grantees Since 2019

  2019

  2020

  2021

  Total

  Carbon Mapper, Inc.

  $10,080,638

  $10,080,638

  Potential Energy Coalition, Inc.

  $4,500,000

  $4,500,000

  Tides Center

  $4,013,868

  $440,311

  $4,454,179

  Water Foundation

  $250,000

  $2,176,000

  $1,648,727

  $4,074,727

  Isaiah

  $200,000

  $3,050,000

  $3,250,000

  Except for the Environmental Defense Fund (a major climate change advocacy group), Windward’s grants are the most unusual of the five sisters, because they show a less obvious inclination toward hot-button issues.58 But nearly every one of its grants bears the tagline “environmental programs.”

  North Fund’s Top Grantees Since 2019

  2019

  2020

  2021

  Total

  Future Forward USA Action

  $6,736,650

  $6,736,650

  New Approach Montana

  $4,727,500

  $4,727,500

  Colorado Families First

  $4,400,000

  $4,400,000

  Sixteen Thirty Fund

  $800,000

  $1,900,000

  $2,700,000

  Missourians for Health Care

  $500,000

  $1,913,370

  $2,413,370

  Following the lead of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the North Fund also helped Future Forward USA Action, the main “dark money” group that passed millions of dollars to Future Forward Action PAC to fund pro-Biden campaign ads in the last few weeks of the 2020 presidential election. But outside of its grants to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the North Fund’s other recent top grantees have been state ballot initiative groups. In fact, what triggered the unmasking of the North Fund as a fifth “sister” nonprofit in Arabella’s arsenal was funding to New Approach Montana’s work in support of a 2020 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in the state. North Fund also donated to Colorado Families First, the group behind a ballot initiative campaign for statewide paid family leave during the 2020 election. Missourians for Health Care supported a Medicaid expansion ballot initiative in the August primary.