Both sides in American politics accuse the other of being unduly and sometimes even unlawfully influenced by “dark money” in politics, and both sides are guilty to an extent. The difference is how “dark money” is defined and what is done in its name. This is where the both-sidesism ends.

We know what constitutes dark money, according to Democrats — they put it in a Senate report in 2021.

Democrat Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan were upset about a Supreme Court decision upholding a Texas law that banned abortion after 15 weeks and allowed citizens to take civil actions against suspected abortionists. They railed against the “shadow docket” — which the court uses to rule on matters that need quick decisions — and the “right-wing donor interests” who spent “hundreds of millions of dollars to stack the court with anti-abortion justices like Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.” They said the court was now “delivering for those donors.”

Then came the kicker from Whitehouse, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee: “The vast majority of Americans don’t want government intruding on a woman’s fundamental constitutional right to her own reproductive healthcare choices,” he said. “That’s why the dark-money forces behind [the Texas law] engineered an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court — to do things the American people won’t abide from elective branches of government.”

This is nonsense.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are on the bench because they were nominated by a Republican president and approved by a Republican-controlled Senate — all of whom won elections to get there. Republicans even risked their majority at the end of 2016 to keep Merrick Garland off the court and then appoint Gorsuch later.

Republicans were successful not because they swamped the judiciary with “dark money” but because they leveled with the American people. They wanted pro-life judges on the bench, and they won the elections to make that possible. The Democrats’ report is essentially a long list of conservative/pro-life organizations and the conservative/pro-life donors who supported those organizations to help bring about this policy change. It’s all out in the open, which makes the term “dark money” an odd (and dishonest) way to describe this.

It works a little differently when Democrats deal in “dark money.” For one thing, the money is actually dark. Some donations come from outside the U.S. and are spent to advance interests that may even be inimical to ours. Some come from inside the government and amount to political activities funded by taxpayer dollars.

It is reported that Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s hapless Transportation Secretary, meets regularly with dark money groups who push him to advocate ever-more-restrictive energy policies.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has also met with high-profile leftist donors. In fact, the first meeting she took after being sworn in was with Bill Gates, a multimillion-dollar donor to green initiatives. Green advocates now pump more money into the political system than fossil fuel promoters, which is why it’s no coincidence that the Biden administration is systematically destroying the energy independence we had achieved and its strategic advantages.

Whatever the reasons for the Biden administration’s assault on the fossil fuel industry, it simply can’t be argued this has benefited the American people. It can, however, be argued to benefit George Soros, a leftist billionaire who has vowed to bring the U.S. to its knees. Soros is a major “dark money” funder of the leftist green movement, to which Whitehouse himself proudly belongs. Soros has donated more than $12 million since 2018 to an organization that hides behind an “incubator” of activist groups, so it does not have to reveal its donors. If its policy actions benefit Americans, then why does it need the extra levels of secrecy?

The difference between the Right and Left on this issue is stark. On the Right, “dark money” is people pushing for positions, publicly advocating for policy changes, and electing the people to bring about those changes. On the Left, it’s shady, questionable funding being dumped into the political system by people with an explicitly anti-American agenda.

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So the next time you hear the term “dark money,” the question to ask is: Whose?

Michael J. Pappas is a former U.S. representative for New Jersey.