When I began a career of digging into the Left’s shadowy financiers, conservatives were losing the “dark money” war. Less than a decade later, it’s the Left facing extinction — and no one’s more astonished by the turnaround than I am.

In August, news came that the Gates Foundation — one of the world’s largest mega-funders of “progressive” political schemes — was quietly defunding Arabella Advisors, the dark money ATM that’s benefitted from over half a billion dollars from Gates since 2009. Armed with billions, the Arabella network exploits our nonprofit charity laws to agitate for D.C. statehood, pack the Supreme Court, and fund Democrat voter drives — all under the guise of philanthropy, and entirely tax-free.

The New York Times waved off the decision as a blip that “sparked unease in the world of progressive philanthropy.” But this is no blip. It’s a sign that, for the first time, Democrats are facing a crisis they can’t bluster or buy their way out of… and it’s only going to deepen.

I should know. I was the first to expose the Arabella network in 2018, and I have been tracking it ever since. Here’s how it works.

Anyone who knows its more famous cousin, the Tides Foundation, will quickly recognize the playbook. Instead of cutting checks directly to activist groups, leftist mega-donors and foundations route billions through tax-exempt nonprofits directly controlled by Arabella Advisors. That masks their identities and lets them play at being respectable philanthropies, while still bankrolling grubby political crusades. 

These are not political action committees like the RNC or DNC, which are heavily regulated by the FEC. The Left prefers to weaponize 501(c)(3) organizations like your local church or the Salvation Army — hence the scheme’s nickname, “charitable money-laundering.” This arrangement skirts clear laws barring foundations from intervening in politics by labeling things like voter registration “charity.” And leftists have been at it since the 1970s. 

The Arabella model adds a sinister twist: It manufacturers “pop-up” front groups that do all the dirty work in-house through a process insiders call fiscal sponsorship. These are little more than jazzed-up websites with generic names like “Fix Our Senate” and “Floridians for a Fair Shake” passing themselves off as independent, grassroots groups. Yet they’re unplugged the moment a campaign wraps up with little to no paper trail. No public filings or disclosures revealing their activities or donors. Nothing real at all — save the damage done to our country. 

Behind the pop-up campaigns are Arabella’s seven spin-off nonprofits with equally forgettable names — “Hopewell Fund,” “New Venture Fund,” “Telescope Fund,” and others — shells run by Arabella staffers reaping seven-figure consulting fees. 

This constellation raked in an incredible $9 billion while flying almost completely under the radar. You’ll find its reach almost everywhere in politics from fake news sites, the Paris Climate Agreement, and even the Lincoln Project’s Never Trump campaign ads. I’ve documented the complete story at my investigative news site, Restoration News.

Amazingly, Arabella started this lucrative enterprise 20 years ago. Yet conservatives only discovered it in 2018… and completely by accident.

At the time, I was a newly minted journalist reporting on professional activists trying to block President Trump from nominating a conservative justice to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. One name stood out as unfamiliar: Demand Justice, a group not found in IRS archives yet which boasted expensive, glossy, pre-printed signs — each bearing the name of a different potential nominee from Trump’s shortlist (“Stop Kavanaugh,” “Stop Barrett,” etc.). Only after punching the group’s address into Google did I realize Demand Justice was just one small cog in a vast political machine, and all of it centered on a single office in downtown Washington: the Arabella mothership itself.

I spent the next four years mapping every inch of this empire, from its origins and board connections to its lobbying and donors. Along the way, I met incredible reporters and diggers — real pros with talents that helped me hone my own — who had discovered key pieces of the Arabella puzzle, but hadn’t yet fitted them together. Though you’d have to dig for my name, that work eventually found its way into conservative news, the Mark Levin Show, Don Jr.’s tweets, multiple state legislatures and Capitol Hill, and then finally the liberal papers that once concealed the Left’s dark money dominance. There’s even a tell-all book about Arabella’s evil exploits by my dear friend and mentor, Scott Walter (buy the book, you won’t regret it!).

We all watched Arabella slowly transform from the Man Behind the Curtain into the very poster child for dark money, and change the politics around dark money for good.

The Democrats’ Sinking Ship

Anyone familiar with the structure of the post-Obama Democratic Party knows it’s captured by the activist class, or what insiders call “the groups.” Their domination arguably peaked in 2020, when devious nonprofiteers handed Joe Biden the presidency with their “permanent campaign” model: A combination of partisan Zuck bucks, microtargeted voter registration, and get-out-the-vote drives in blue precincts. Much of it was funded and influenced by Arabella. 

At the same time the Left was dramatically outspending the Right in untraceable nonprofit dollars, Arabella was trying to restrict free speech by labeling it “dark money,” a term progressives coined in 2010 to criticize conservative political spending. Their goal wasn’t fairness or transparency. They wanted to permanently lock Republicans out of power by ensuring we couldn’t copy their permanent campaign strategy — which, of course, we ultimately did. 

It took Kamala Harris’ disastrous defeat last year to weaken the activists’ grip on the party. As a writer specializing in the structure of professional Washington, I can’t overstate how eye-opening this was to watch. Grousing about our leaders is quite common on the Right; yet questioning “the groups” is utter heresy on the Left.

Post-election headlines scream otherwise:

Vox: “Are progressive groups sinking Democrats’ electoral chances?”

Axios: “Democrats start clawing each other’s eyes out”

Vanity Fair: “Infighting. Panic. Blame. A Special Report From Inside the Democratic Party’s Epic Hangover”

In These Times: “Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse”

Again, that sort of out-in-the-open critique is normal in the GOP — but it’s unthinkable among Democrats. Now, however, party strategists are blaming the groups for leading them into the political wilderness, and Democrats’ once-respectable financiers are trying to wriggle out of the crosshairs, beginning with the Gates Foundation. They won’t be the last to denounce Arabella.

That retreat from Arabella is the first sign the far Left’s money spigot is drying up. You see it in the Democrats’ recent money woes — everyone from the DNC and state parties to the groups themselves are short on cash, with donors demanding change. Leadership’s civil war resembles a Stalinist politburo in the middle of a succession fight, but it’s the radicals who are approaching a full-on rout. 

It’s hard to say what comes next. But history shows that culture wars end when Americans harden around a new consensus — and anyone caught on the other side of that political divide will soon find himself in permanent electoral exile. Think the Tories after the American Revolution, the Southern planters after the Civil War, the GOP after 1929 … or today’s woketariat.

Sixteen years ago, when the Gates Foundation first began funding the Arabella network, the Left commanded the sympathy of the American people, an army of paid protesters, and the donor class. They’ve already lost the people. Now they’re losing the billionaires, too. That leaves the world’s oldest political party looking more and more like its most lavishly funded Marxist book club. 

If I were Arabella Advisors, I’d start looking for a new gig. This one’s up.

Hayden Ludwig is the founder of Restoration News and author of Arabella: The Left’s Dark Money Monster.