Gates has pulled out of Arabella.
Arabella is a network of organizations controlled by Arabella Advisors, which has a billion dollars in annual revenue and a reported 425 employees, and is the nation’s largest political consulting firm.
In what The New York Times called “a symbolically significant blow to a powerful player in liberal politics,” the Gates Foundation quietly stopped funding Arabella, which is “seen as a power center on the left.”
The Times has described Arabella as “funnel[ing] hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes.” The leftwing magazine The Atlantic called it the “mothership” of a “massive progressive dark-money group.”
In 2020, Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund donated $410 million toward defeating Trump and winning Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. Recently, the “No Kings” group protesting President Trump’s reforms “bagged $114.8 million from the Arabella dark money network,” according to the Government Accountability institute. An Arabella-backed group, Community Change, brought hundreds of people to Washington, D.C. to protest the President’s anti-crime efforts in that city. The liberal Wired magazine reported recently that an Arabella group called Chorus was paying more than 90 online influencers $8,000 a month each, provided that the influencers could not support political campaigns without approval, that their posts could be removed for any reason by the people paying them, and that the deal with Chorus had to be kept secret.
Gates has “invested” over $450 million in Arabella-managed nonprofits over the past 16 years. In 2019-22 it was the second-biggest funder of one of the key Arabella components, the New Venture Fund, according to the Capital Research Center.
The new Gates policy regarding Arabella was discussed in a note sent to some Gates Foundation employees in June; the change was publicly reported last week. The stated reason for the change was to eliminate the middleman – that is, for the foundation to deal more directly with people at the grassroots. “Teams are increasingly working directly with programmatic partners — organizations that are deeply embedded in the communities we serve and closely aligned with our mission. As we look ahead, this is a chance to build deeper, more durable relationships with those partners — and to reinforce the kind of legacy we want to leave behind.”
The foundation said it would not make new “investments” with Arabella-related entities such as the Redstone Group, a consulting firm that Arabella bought in 2023. It would not extend existing grants and would “pursue early exits” from some projects in which it is currently involved.
By the way, when National Legal and Policy Center chairman Peter Flaherty attended the 2023 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting, he raised the issue of the Gates Foundation’s funding of Arabella. Warren Buffett, who has provided about half of the foundation’s assets, was chairing the meeting as Flaherty noted:
The Gates Foundation may be the largest single donor to the “dark money” machine known as Arabella Advisors. It funds causes like defunding the police that are making American cities unlivable. Money goes, too, to groups conducting –
Flaherty did not finish because his microphone was cut off. He was speaking properly, in favor of an NLPC-sponsored shareholder proposal, and his name was on the agenda, but he was arrested. (The charge was dropped.)
Abandoning Arabella is not the only case of the Gates Foundation responding to political changes in Washington. Recently, it agreed to stop engaging in racial discrimination in its scholarship program.
Cynics noted that Bill Gates, who met recently with President Trump, might be coming to recognize that his leftwing political connections are hurting his reputation as a philanthropist. Leftwing nonprofits have operated for years as a lawless zone, confident that they will rarely be investigated and almost never prosecuted. But President Trump has directed that the laws be applied to such entities as the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, and a House committee is investigating allegations of foreign money flowing into that platform. The actions against ActBlue, a signal that the Left is no longer immune, has reportedly raised concerns among donors about groups similar to Arabella.
Elon Musk, who led the recent investigation into questionable federal spending, has called publicly for an investigation into Arabella. He said it was a key funder of a “leftwing NGO cabal” behind anti-Tesla protests meant to punish Musk for his efforts to expose government waste and fraud.
Arabella Advisors, the parent firm, uses a model that’s not uncommon in modern politics: a profit-making enterprise that services nonprofits and controls them.
Under the direction of the central firm, money from wealthy foundations, corporations, and individuals is used to build the Democratic Party and the Left, sometimes overtly such as through political action committees (PACs) and sometimes covertly through supposedly nonpartisan activities such as voter registration (which is targeted at presumed Democratic and leftwing voters). Much of the funding is anonymous, so-called “dark money” that is difficult or impossible to trace. Apparently nonpolitical charities – those claiming to provide healthcare for poor people or to fight hunger – provide cover.
David Strom wrote for Hot Air:
Arabella is closely tied to the Clintons, and if it weakens, so will the Clintons. Gates’ move is not, in itself, a crippling blow to Arabella or the Democrats, but it seems to be a part of a large-scale shift in sentiment among big donors. They saw the election of Trump in 2016 as an anomaly, and in many cases redoubled their efforts to help Democrats during Trump’s first term and during the Biden administration. While these donors lean left, one of the key reasons they poured money into Arabella and left-wing groups was a sense that their bread is buttered by the Democrats, or, in some cases, the donations to left-wing causes were a way to buy immunity from Democrat retribution.
Trump’s reelection proved that the market value of donations to left-wing organizations has plummeted, and along with that, the money has evaporated.
The seven main components of the Arabella network are the New Venture Fund (NVF), the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, the North Fund, the Telescope Fund, and the Impetus Fund.
NVF, the main recipient of Gates money, is fiscal sponsor to some 170 nonprofit projects. It is a tax-exempt group barred from engaging in partisan politics, but it has donated to groups that lobby and that do “civic engagement,” a euphemism for organizing Democrats and leftwingers. And NVF donated to its sister group Sixteen Thirty Fund, which in turn donated $97 million to pro-Democrat/anti-Republican SuperPACs since 2016.
According to the leftwing group OpenSecrets, which monitors lobbying and campaign finance, NVF has “acted as a pass-through agency funneling millions of dollars in grants for wealthy donors to opaque groups with minimal disclosure.” Axios reported that NVF has been “criticized for obscuring information about the scores of subsidiary groups they sponsor.”
The watchdog site InfluenceWatch reported that the seven sister nonprofits “have collectively paid Arabella over $200 million in consulting fees while creating hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations through ‘fiscal sponsorship’ agreements that generate ‘pop-up groups’ that operate under the umbrella of an Arabella-managed nonprofit. They are not required to file independent financial disclosure forms, and often exist as little more than a website. Arabella portrays itself as a simple provider of human resources, accounting, and legal services for these nonprofits. But leaked documents show that Arabella has ‘centralized control’ over its ‘managed organizations’ and even the pop-up groups they create.”
Arabella Advisors and the Arabella network were founded in 2005 by Eric Kessler, whose family sold their auto parts business for $750 million when he was 26. Kessler worked for the League of Conservation Voters and for the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, and he spent six years at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a part of the Clinton political machine. Kessler currently serves on the board of NDI.
NDI has been funded by taxpayers through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the State Department. It has also received money from foreign governments including Australia, Belgium, and Denmark, and from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The Washington Post’s foreign editor described NDI’s parent organization NED as “the sugar daddy of overt operations.” Due to the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, NDI earlier this year was forced to lay off two-thirds of its staff in Washington, D.C. and to close offices in other countries.
The watchdog group Americans for Public Trust has called Arabella the key vehicle for foreign money flowing into U.S politics, particularly from Swiss billionaire and Clinton friend Hansjorg Wyss.
In 2020, Arabella Advisors was bought by a private equity firm, Concentric Equity Partners, which earlier this year de-listed Arabella from its investments on its website.
Arabella’s chief marketing officer, Megan Cartier, quoted in the Times, said the organization merely “provides operational supports to hundreds of philanthropic clients pursuing social change.”
She added: “We do not have donors, make grants, or engage in political activity.”
That statement is technically true, like Bill Belichick saying, “I never played in the NFL.” As noted by Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center, Cartier’s remark “is, at best, the old fact-checker’s dodge of ‘true but false.’ Arabella itself may not have donors, make grants, or engage in political activities, but the ‘seven sisters’ nonprofits that Arabella manages absolutely do all those things.”
Perhaps the best reaction to the change by the Gates Foundation is this headline from PJ Media:
“It’s Official: Bill Gates Now Contains 2 Percent Less Bond Villain.”
Dr. Steven J. Allen is an NLPC Senior Fellow.
