New Filings: Left's Top Dark Money ATM Boosted Dem Turnout, Lawfare in 2024

There's nothing like a presidential election to open the Big Money Left's spigots, and 2024 was no different.

Restoration News traced new filings by six organizations in the Arabella Advisors dark money network—perhaps the largest "progressive" political ATM in the world—to create a snapshot of the beast in action. What we found was a well-oiled machine dedicated to electing Democrats, advancing the radical climate and abortion agendas, registering left-wing voters, and gerrymandering the maps in key swing states. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

If you're unfamiliar with Arabella Advisors, it was the poster child of leftist dark money. Keyword "was"—the company sold off its fiscal sponsorship services in November 2024 to "Sunflower Services," effectively ending a two-decades run as the Left's political juggernaut. Launched in 2005 by ex-Clinton administration official and eco-activist Eric Kessler, the recently dissolved Arabella was a private company that headed a fleet of public charities and social welfare organizations, purportedly for philanthropic purposes.

In reality, Arabella's organizations were more like puppets for far-left mega-funders like the Ford Foundation, Reid Hoffman, or George Soros. Through Arabella, those deep-pocketed donors exploited our loose charitable laws to funnel gobs of money into partisan causes like abortion-on-demand—$1.5 billion in 2024, to be precise.

This kind of cozy arrangement predates Arabella—starting with the Tides Foundation in the 1980s—but its effect is the same: Helping the Left fund itself (often with a tax write-off, to boot). And groups like Arabella get a slice of the pie for their trouble. For decades, it gave Democrats a massive spending advantage over conservatives that's much harder to trace than traditional "hard dollars" from political action committees.

But that doesn't mean it's untraceable.

(READ OUR FULL EXPOSE ON ARABELLA: Arabella: The Left’s “Dark Money” Monster)

The Kraken

Much has changed since this writer began reporting on the Arabella empire in 2018, but its fundamentals remain the same.

The flagship nonprofit, New Venture Fund, raked in $662 million in 2024—one-third of which came from just three anonymous donors. Its top advocacy arm, Sixteen Thirty Fund, pulled in $282 million, of which 40 percent came from just two unnamed donors. That's about $100 million more than it reported in 2023 revenues, matching historical trends. Political arms grow richer in election years than in off years.

Arabella's groups have always maintained they're charities engaged in "impact investment," a euphemism for political activism. Yet in recent years, the fleet has leaned into its overt support for "race equity," diversity, and inclusion, or REDI, to counter conservative criticism. Just compare the New Venture Fund's websites from 2018 and 2025.

Another torpedo to the charitable claim: Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democrat political operative who pushed Obamacare and projects of David Brock's American Bridge 21st Century, is now employed as a New Venture Fund project president (salary: $350,000). That's about as philanthropic as Marc Elias's next election lawsuit.

But Arabella's advocacy arms—Sixteen Thirty Fund and North Fund—have long since abandoned all pretenses to neutrality. In November, Sixteen Thirty Fund director Amy Kurtz boasted of her group's efforts to ensure "the progressive movement endures" by bankrolling pro-abortion ballot campaigns in Arizona and Montana in 2024. Those campaigns' success highlights the power of dark money.

Even as voters rushed out to vote President Donald Trump back into the Oval Office, abortion hardliners slaughtered their opponents at the ballot box in Arizona and Montana. And they did it by outspending pro-lifers no less than 26 times in Arizona and an unbelievable 93 times in Montana. Now, the "fundamental right to an abortion" is embedded in the constitutions of states that broke comfortably for Republicans, to the Right's shame.

But this has always been the Arabella network's superpower: Helping secretive mega-donors fund the army of activists, agitators, and lawyers who run the Democrat Party—and much of America. For a taste of the network's vast reach, here are the highlights of groups backed by the Arabella machine in 2024, selected out of thousands of grants for maximum effect:

America Votes & America Votes Education Fund ($40.5 million): Arguably the single largest organized effort to register and turn out Democrat voting blocs in swing states nationwide. It was run by the late Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, which shows how interconnected the activist Left truly is.

Clean Slate Initiative ($19 million): Focused on expunging the records of former inmates, state-by-state, as part of the Left's effort to activate the felon vote.

Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund ($18 million): A pass-through group that funds "large-scale voter participation programs in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, AAPI and immigrant communities" in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and other purple states.

Law Forward ($200,000): A lawfare group working to paint Wisconsin bright blue—first by gerrymandering its maps to favor Democrats with Marc Elias' help, then by suing to expand mass mail-in balloting and drop boxes in a state plagued by election fraud.

The Black Radical Project ($1 million): Publisher of Hammer & Hope, a communist magazine launched in 2023 as a New Venture Fund project with funding from the Ford Foundation. The project claims inspiration from the Black Panthers, Alabama's Communist Party in the 1930s, and Black Lives Matter, and is deeply involved in the pro-Hamas Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that downplayed the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel.

Floridians Protecting Freedom ($23.5 million): The main sponsor of Florida's 2024 pro-abortion rights campaign (Amendment 4), which won 57% of the vote but fell short of the 60% threshold to amend the state constitution—for now. Sixteen Thirty Fund's $23.5 million contribution constituted one-fifth of the group's $122 million budget.

Retire Career Politicians PAC ($2 million): Poured over $16 million into the effort to defeat Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) in 2024, only to lose 53-47%. Hey, it's a ruby red state; what can you expect?

Rocky Mountains Values PAC ($600,000): Backs Colorado Democrats to unseat the state's few remaining Republicans. In 2024, the PAC blew $475,000 supporting MAGA "election denier" Ron Hanks in the Republican primary to replace relocated Rep. Lauren Boebert, believing him easier to beat than Will Hurd. He lost, as did Hurd's eventual opponent, former Aspen city councilman Adam Frisch. But it's a strategy Democrats have used to devastating effect—meddling in GOP primaries—showing why closed primaries are essential.

(THE RIGHT INSIGHTS: SCOTUS Just Missed a Big Opportunity to Stop Election Meddling)

Straight Talk Politics PAC ($450,000): Your friendly, local, middle-of-the-road group just trying to cut out all the political noise… by backing Kamala Harris.

Institute for Responsive Government & IRG Action Fund ($16 million): A think tank incubated by Arabella's New Venture Fund that automatically registers Americans to vote. It's run by Sam Oliker-Friedland, former voting rights litigator in the Obama administration's Justice Department and chief counsel for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections. The latter group helped distribute some $400 million in 2020 Zuck Bucks, as exposed by Restoration News.

Unrig Our Economy ($5 million): Think Bernie's tired "millionaires and billionaires" saw, but bottled and sold like snake oil. The group was originally formed in 2022 out of the merger of two Sixteen Thirty Fund pop-ups—Tax March and Health Care Voter ("Tax Health Care March" failed to stick)—battling the first Trump administration's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the repeal of Obamacare. Now, it's out with a bold new sequel: Families Over Billionaires, battling Trump 2.0's tax policies.

Money Can't Buy Everything

For all its wealth and power, Arabella took a serious beating in the press. In August 2025, the Gates Foundation—one of the machine's biggest and earliest supporters—quietly defunded Arabella's groups after 16 years of steady funding. The move came as part of Bill Gates' effort to, per the New York Times, "insulate the charity from political pressures."

That's no bump in the road—it's a catastrophe.

Remember, the premise of the Left is political pressure. Progressives learned a century ago that small groups of highly motivated, well-coordinated elites can topple empires—think Lenin's Bolsheviks, Hitler's brownshirts, or William Wilberforce's abolitionists. In revolutionary terms, democracy is an illusion, or at least an ideal. Real change is more often driven by cliques than organic mass movements of the people. And since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger, the American Left has pursued victory through oligarchy with ruthless efficiency and its weapons of choice: Fake "mass" demonstrations, tireless lobbying, claiming the supposed moral high ground, and gobs and gobs of money.

That last bit is key. Without its limitless funding, the Left is reduced to a Marxist book club that couldn't overthrow a Starbucks, let alone America's constitutional order.

We aren't there yet, but we're getting closer. And if conservatives are clever, they'll see their enemy's weakness—and pounce.

(KEEP FOLLOWING THE MONEY: The Left’s Top Dark Money Monster Is Dying—and Taking the Democratic Party With It)