The Democratic oligarchs funding pro-Hamas nonprofits

Biden’s pro-Israel stance is more rhetoric than reality

BY PARK MACDOUGALD, UNHERD

Last Wednesday, several dozen pro-Palestinian activists, their faces obscured by keffiyehs and Covid masks, attempted to block the entrance to the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in Washington, DC. Reports of a riot may have been hyperbole, but footage showed a chaotic demonstration reminiscent of the racial justice protests of 2020. The organizers later accused the police of attacking the “non-violent” protestors; Capitol Police claimed that six of its officers were assaulted.

The protest was the latest instance of the growing hostility between the Biden administration and America’s activist Left, which accuses the President of complicity in an ongoing “genocide” in Gaza. Depending on your perspective, this conflict can be read in one of two ways: either it is evidence that Biden, the old white moderate, is out of touch with his party’s increasingly diverse and Left-wing base; or it is reassuring proof that the adults in the Democratic establishment are still in charge of their party, despite their occasional indulgence of youthful radicalism.

This framing is flattering to both sides. For the radical Left, which find its values endorsed by nearly every prestige institution in the country, from Harvard to the CIA, it provides reassurance that they really are an embattled, anti-establishment minority bravely speaking truth to power. For the moderates, not least Jewish Democrats horrified to see Left-wing college students cheering the murder of Israeli women and children, it functions more as a defence mechanism, sustaining them in the illusion that the party is still run by and for people like them.

But the division between the activist Left and the party establishment is little more than a politically useful fiction. In reality, the radical cadres are bankrolled by the same nexus of progressive oligarchs and dark-money slush funds that finance the party establishment.

Soros, of course, is the most prominent individual Democratic donor in the country — he personally spent $170 million to get Democrats elected in the 2022 midterms, and his nonprofit spent at least another $140 million. Arabella Advisors is less well-known but may be just as influential. Run by the Clintonworld insider Eric Kessler, the for-profit consultancy manages a vast and opaque empire of funds and nonprofits aligned with the Democratic Party. Its role, in essence, is to allow wealthy donors to hide their donations. For a sense of the scale involved, Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Arabella group that donated to INN, spent more than $400 million on the 2020 election.

Crucially, Arabella is also notable for pioneering the use of “fiscal sponsorships”. This is an arrangement — essentially a loophole in American tax law — that allows smaller nonprofits to be legally merged into a “fiscal sponsor”, meaning that they do not have to disclose their donors or report them to the IRS. As the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this year, Arabella discovered that these rules allowed a sophisticated and well-funded sponsor to create an army of pop-up “grassroots” activist groups that in reality are completely controlled by their sponsor.

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