It’s no secret that billionaires fund some of the most rabidly Left Democrats in the country. They’ll do anything to silence conservatives from telling the truth.
And dark money Democrats were exposed for this massive censorship plot against conservatives.
The past weeks have shown the American people there is a concerted effort to silence any opposition to the Democrat party line.
The Left has recruited the FBI, the DOJ, and countless other government offices to collude with social media giants to hide and ban conservative opinions.
But the story goes deeper than anyone could have ever predicted.
Thanks to the Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of the networks’ donations, many funds controlled by Arabella Advisors, a Democrat-linked consulting business, are discreetly funding studies by universities and non-profits into how online “misinformation” and “disinformation” spread.
According to tax filings and statements on the funds’ and Arabella’s websites, Arabella Advisors, led by former Bill Clinton official Eric Kessler, manages certain administrative, legal, and philanthropic functions of several non-profits, including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, North Fund, and New Venture Fund, which donate to a variety of left-leaning groups, causes, and Democratic candidates.
A DCNF analysis of public grants found some funds within the network are also sponsoring research into the consequences of, and how best to mitigate, misinformation and disinformation.
Many of the Arabella-funded research projects name conservatives primarily as misinformation spreaders, with several initiatives advocating methods to prevent misinformation propagation, such as censorship.
The New Venture Fund funded a project called “The True Costs of Misinformation” at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy in March, led by the center’s research director Joan Donovan, to study the effects of online misinformation, particularly on “vulnerable communities,” according to the project description. The initiative includes a workshop with many panels discussing various subjects linked to the perceived effects of misinformation.
According to the workshop agenda, Steven Feldstein’s presentation at the Carnegie Council titled “What Is Driving Conservativism’s Post-Democratic Turn in America?” ostensibly examined the impact of misinformation on the perceived “anti-democratic” attitudes espoused by conservatives in the United States.
“How did American conservatives reach a point where their main political messages are either blatantly anti-democratic or outright falsehoods?” the presentation’s description read, alleging that “political partisanship” in the U.S. was “largely stoked by conservative propaganda and disinformation.”
One panel was solely focused on measures for “misinformation mitigation,” featuring presentations from experts at the University of Washington and Google, among others. Legislative action to change election laws to combat election misinformation was one of the methods, as was “psychological inoculation” against dis- and misinformation.
Another presentation aimed to figure out ways to demonetize sites pushing “divisive disinformation on COVID” at “the industry or policy level,” according to the workshop program.
The Shorenstein Center did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Furthermore, The New Venture Fund funded a 2021 research project led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University College London that investigated methods for mitigating misinformation by allowing “social groups” to “[exchange] judgments regarding the probability that news is true,” according to the project’s acknowledgments. According to the project, “misinformation spread” is “one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy.”
Another Arabella-managed philanthropic entity, the Hopewell Fund, financed a study project, the results of which were published in The Atlantic, that explored how disinformation spreads on Facebook, with an emphasis on “superusers.” The report quoted “Calvin,” who uses the word “gay” as a slur and asserts that black communities are always “SHITHOLES,” and “Michelle,” a woman who opposes the “plandemic.”
The writers of the article appeared to advocate censorship as the most efficient method of combating disinformation.
“Allowing a small set of people who behave horribly to dominate the platform is Facebook’s choice, not an inevitability,” the article read. “If each of Facebook’s 15,000 U.S. moderators aggressively reviewed several dozen of the most active users and permanently removed those guilty of repeated violations, abuse on Facebook would drop drastically within days.”
The project was part of a “program focused on supporting researchers studying misinformation and accountability on the social web,” according to the Hopewell Fund.
According to an OpenSecrets review of its campaign spending, the Sixteen Thirty Fund explicitly donates to Democratic political action committees (PACs) and candidates, while the Arabella network’s other funds bankroll left-leaning and Democrat-affiliated groups that engage in electoral activism and issue-based advocacy, according to The New York Times.
“Groups like the Arabella network weaponize charitable laws and tax exemption to aid Democratic electoral victories, bypassing the IRS prohibition on electioneering,” Hayden Ludwig, a senior investigative researcher at Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative watchdog group researching liberal financial influence said.
The Hopewell Fund sponsored both the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, which spent nearly $150 million together prior to the 2020 election in “get-out-the-vote” efforts targeting Democratic demographics according to the New York Times; the fund also bankrolled a Democrat-aligned legal group, Democracy Docket Legal Fund, led by Democratic Party election lawyer Marc Elias.
The memo received by CRC revealed the New Venture Fund also established the Trusted Elections Fund, which courted contributors to contribute money into election security initiatives ahead of the 2020 election.
The fund made grants in part to “prepare journalists and civil society organizations with tools to respond to mis/disinformation and cybersecurity issues.”
“Nonprofits pour hundreds of millions of dollars into voter registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns which micro-target likely Democratic voters,” Ludwig said. “The Arabella nonprofits are a massive funnel to shift those millions from foundations and mega-donors to these professional activists.”
The Arabella network provides financial support for academic research as well as non-profit organizations that do misinformation and disinformation studies.
According to the Media Democracy Fund’s website, the New Venture Fund is the architect of the Media Democracy Fund, a grantmaking non-profit that supports a variety of left-wing groups engaged in the areas of media and communications.
The Media Democracy Fund is supported by a number of affluent partners, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
The Disinfo Defense League, which describes itself as “a distributed national network of organizers, researchers, and disinformation experts disrupting online racialized disinformation infrastructure and campaigns that deliberately target Black, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander, and other communities of color,” was partially funded by the Media Democracy Fund.
Among the league’s members are a number of left-wing and progressive activist organizations, including Free Press, the Women’s March, and Ultraviolet.
The group sponsored multiple webinars, training, and other educational events with disinformation experts ahead of the 2020 election, in collaboration with Joan Donovan of the Shorenstein Center, to prepare activists to counteract perceived misinformation, according to Protocol.
The New Venture Fund also sponsored a fellowship at the Algorithmic Integrity Institute, which was defined as “a pilot program to train ethnic media reporters to identify, surface, and analyze instances” of misinformation and other undesirable content.
Tax documents exposed that the fund also donated approximately $25 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an institution that received hundreds of millions in “zuckbucks” from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to run elections in 2020.
A July 2020 guidebook said the group educated election workers to recognize potential election misinformation and listed former President Donald Trump as a prominent generator of election falsehoods.
According to the North Fund’s company papers, Accountable Internet is a registered trade brand of the North Fund. Accountable Tech analyzes and advocates against online misinformation in addition to pro-antitrust activism and support for privacy rules for tech corporations.
The group planned a lobbying campaign aimed at advertisers to boycott Twitter in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover, citing the threat of misinformation among other concerns. The North Fund declined to comment to The Washington Free Beacon, which also reported on this link, but stated that it “follows all disclosure requirements related to individual donor and grantee disclosure.”
Stay tuned to Prudent Politics.
