Scott Walter May 1 audio

Arabella Advisors is a secretive "dark money" operation that channels funds from mega-donors into left-wing political causes through pop-up groups. These groups appear to be grassroots organizations, but are actually created by Arabella. Scott Walter, author of the book "Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America," explains how the network operates like a pyramid, with Arabella Advisors at the top, nonprofits in the middle, and over 500 pop-up groups at the base. Two important initiatives connected to Arabella are Demand Justice and Fix the Court, which oppose conservative nominations to the Supreme Court. Arabella's network yearly spends billions of dollars, far surpassing the one-time $1.6 billion gift received by conservative Leonard Leo. The mainstream media's reporting on this issue has been misleading and exaggerated. This program is brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. If you would like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. We hope you enjoy the program. Hello and welcome to the Anchoring Truths Podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Snedeker. While figures like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are known for their hefty political donations, few Americans have heard of Arabella Advisors. Even more powerful than these standalone billionaires, Arabella is a secretive, quote-unquote, dark money operation that channels mega-donor funds into leftist political causes via pop-up groups designed to look like innocent grassroots outfits. Today's episode will get into the behemoth that is Arabella with the author of a new book about it, Scott Walter. Arabella, The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America, is Scott's first book. Scott is the president of the Indispensable Capital Research Center. He served in the George W. Bush administration as special assistant to the president for domestic policy and was vice president at the Philanthropy Roundtable. He graduated from Georgetown, where he was a student of our founder and director, Hadley Arcus. This episode, compared to most of our other podcast episodes, is fabulous, but it also gets into the weeds, and so we apologize in advance for some of the technical terms, but we really think that this is such an important subject that we want our listeners to understand just how so much in D.C., particularly on the left, gets funded, and why you should make sense of it in our political and our cultural moment right now. Also joining us on the episode is Elizabeth Gluntz, one of our interns at the James Wilson Institute. We hope you enjoy the program. Well, Mr. Walter, it's been a pleasure to meet you and an honor to be speaking with you today about your book, Arabella. So my first question is, in your book, you talk about Arabella as an empire, and you talk about how it's involved in several fiscal sponsorships, which all receive funding from the Arabella Network. Could you talk about how left-wing political initiatives like Demand Justice and Fix the Court represent a sort of mockery of grassroots initiatives, and then talk about these initiatives and their connection to Arabella? Sure. Why don't I give you a quick overview of the way the network itself operates, and then get to the specifics of Demand Justice and Fix the Court. So you can think of Arabella's network as a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, you have Arabella Advisors, which is a for-profit consulting firm. In D.C., they call them Beltway Bandits, right, PR, consulting, that kind of thing. In the middle of the pyramid, you have a half dozen nonprofits of different legal types, and that's where the money goes, right? So if you're Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, or Hans-Jürg Wies, the foreign Swiss national billionaire, or George Soros or Zuckerberg and whatnot, they write checks to that middle level, which is the nonprofits. At the base of the pyramid, you have hundreds, over 500, pop-up groups or fake groups, right? Now they have snazzy names like Floridians for a Fair Shake, Opportunity Wisconsin, Keep Iowa Healthy, great things like that. But they are intended to look and feel like, oh, these are my neighbors in Florida who are upset about something. These are folks in Wisconsin who want to make things better. But in fact, it's just some guy at a D.C. office popping up a website and creating a new accounting code for this little project. It is not your fellow Floridians, your fellow Iowans. Now, two of the ones that I know you guys are going to especially care about because they're so important in the court world are Demand Justice and Fix the Court. Demand Justice began its life as one of those bottom-of-the-pyramid pop-up groups. And its mid-level nonprofit sponsor was something called the 1630 Fund, which has been accurately described by thoroughly non-conservative sources like Politico and whatnot as one of the biggest Democrat Party heavyweights for dark money, quote, unquote. Now they got their start around 2018, not long before the opening on the Supreme Court that Justice Kennedy's retirement created. In fact, even before the administration had nominated someone to take Kennedy's place, Demand Justice had swung into action. And they literally have in the book, there's a great picture in the introduction. You can see the picture of these signs at this rally, right? Stop Barrett, stop Kavanaugh, stop forgetting the other names like Etheridge, whatever, right? They had multiple pre-printed signs because, of course, they didn't care who was going to get nominated. They were opposed, period, whatever it was. So that is Demand Justice. Now the 1630 Fund is a 501c4 nonprofit. Those are the political nonprofits like the NRA, League of Conservation Voters, Democratic Socialists for America. That kind of nonprofit is perfectly fine for it to be fighting in a nomination battle like that. They can take out millions of dollars in ads. They can endorse candidates for office, et cetera. That's the Demand Justice. Now you also mentioned it's sort of matching hair, but this is a classic thing in the Arabella Network. As I said, those nonprofits in the middle level, they have them in multiple legal flavors. So Demand Justice is the C4 political nonprofit that can take out ads threatening senators if they vote for, for instance, whoever is going to take Kennedy's place on the high court. But they usually like to have a C4 and a C3 matching pair. So the C3 of the pair, also created as originally as one of those bottom level pop-up groups, is Fix the Court. Now it is a C3. Its sponsor was the New Venture Fund. That's the biggest of all their nonprofits. It is good by itself for about a billion dollars a year, which is staggering. The Heritage Foundation, roughly, I think it's $80 million a year, something like that. So just a little different there. But- So Scott, could I just ask you, just for scale purposes, it's, I think, really helpful for our listeners to understand. When you say a billion dollars a year, that's dispersing a billion dollars a year in grants. Not that they have a billion dollars in assets, and maybe they give out $25 million in grants every year. Correct? Yes. The, although, strictly speaking, the first numbers I always go to are the revenue side, which is a bit higher than the expenses or spending side. So the spending side would be a little bit lower. But they're mostly spending what they raise. Okay. So you're right. It's not like a foundation like the, you know, on the left, the Ford Foundation, on the conservative side, the Bradley Foundation, you know, those foundations may have, you know, hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. But you're right. The foundation typically only, a private foundation typically gives out only 5% of its assets in a year. Those numbers are not about assets. They are about fundraising. That's what they hoover up. Yeah, I, in preparation for this, I wanted to give our listeners a sense for how to understand, for example, the left's freak out over Leonard Leo's securing a one-time $1.6 billion gift from the billionaire Barry Seid. When that happened, there were newspaper stories, there were podcasts that were launched. And there was a sense that this $1.6 billion was like a death star that was going to swallow up everything on the left. Meanwhile, what you detail in your book is that this one-time gift pales in comparison to what Arabella does every single year. Is that correct? Yeah. The amount of this once in a lifetime windfall for Leonard Leo is about equal to the annual fundraising of the Arabella network. Yes. So, yeah, the once in a lifetime versus once a year. And let's spell it out too, because there's other, multiple other things to be said about that, because the mainstream media reporting on this is so bad, right? So the entity that received the Barry Seid money was a 501c4 political nonprofit, but, which was part of the reason they were careful, like, oh, my God, the next election cycle, they're going to spend a billion and a half, you know. But of course, that wasn't remotely what was going to happen. That money has not, that was at this point, I think we're two years past the receipt of the money. That money hasn't all been spent. That's, you know, that was never going to be, I'm playing in C4 election cycle stuff. Did a bit of it go towards things like that? No doubt. But by no means, anything like all of it. And in fact, they've already, it was the Marble Freedom Trust is the name of the 501c4 nonprofit that received the money. They've already had to do at least one filing. And you can see that the money is being salted away in things like donor advised fund accounts and other NC3 work and this and that. So it was never the, oh, my God, he's going to control the election cycle. And by the way, in almost every election cycle, we actually did a great, I have a little two minute video on this. It's hilarious. We did like about eight or nine straight election cycles. And we just said, who is the single biggest donor on either side for each of those cycles? And it's things like Tom Steyer trying to make himself president. Well, people don't even remember that, right? So that was a total failure. Or somebody else trying to get, you know, Trump elected in 2020. Well, that didn't work out. The idea that money automatically wins is not true. It's always nice to have money, but that, you know, over and over again on the left and the right, whether it's Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, or Tom Steyer or Michael Bloomberg, you know, they can spend a lot of money, it's not guaranteed they win. So that's another lie. I have to say one more quick thing on the Leonard Leo thing, though, because it's so galling, right? So you're totally right, there are big headlines about that, about this money, because people are horrified that, you know, conservatives might have a billion dollars, right? The Ford Foundation, by the way, has about nine, just by itself. And Soros is saying more than that. And on and on. But anyway, just a few weeks later, there is another news story about Yves Chouinard, another billionaire. He's the guy who started Patagonia. He handed that off to a 501c4. But there was nothing about how this was going to be political. It was he's saving the planet. He's always loved environmentalism. How unbelievably unselfish he's giving his company away, blah, blah. So there was nothing like the coverage was wildly different, even though it was, according to them, about twice as much money, right? And here's the here's the best proof of this. I actually checked not that long ago, a few months ago. I went and I went through like three, four or five straight pages of Google search results. And I look for things like largest dark money contribution, largest political contribution in history. Right. The page after page of results, the largest one in history was to Leonard Leo, even though weeks later, something twice the size came out. And by the way, after that, there was an even bigger one than that, that one of the Koch entities received. So, you know, the demonization of Leonard Leo, for those of us who actually understand these numbers and follow it is laughable, ridiculous nonsense. So could you explain why it would be odd for Arabella as a for profit, like consultancy, really, to be so connected to a wide network of nonprofits and pop up groups? You kind of refer to this as astroturfing in the book, but maybe for the benefit of our listeners before they pick up a copy of your book, which we highly recommend, could you elaborate more on that analogy? Sure, there are other entities that operate similar kinds of arrangements where there is a PR firm that also is connected to nonprofit groups. And then those nonprofit groups will basically sponsor projects of different types. And in fact, just to continue, since we're already talking about it, when Leonard Leo read our first report on Arabella back in 2018, he was amazed at this arrangement. And within a year, he had decided that he would reconfigure his network, still much smaller, obviously, but still, you know, he has some connections to nonprofits and this and that. So he reconfigured it and he linked in his press release to our Arabella report. He also renamed the for profit entity that would be his equivalent of the Arabella Advisors PR firm, he added to its name, Advisors, right, just to sort of make it extra clear, all I'm doing here is trying to catch up to what the folks who've been fighting against me have been doing for years. Is that, in its own way, the source of Arabella's strength, though, the establishment of this framework or what would you say is kind of the secret sauce that makes Arabella just as influential as it is? Well, it is easily the biggest of anything like this left or right. There are other things like this. The Tides Foundation has, well, you've heard of the Tides Foundation. Actually, there's the Tides Network, the Tides Foundation, the Tides Center, and yet more. Again, go to InfluenceWatch.org and our Wikipedia of all this stuff. You can chase it all down. So they've been doing similar kinds of things, too, for instance, but nobody has done it at this scale. And part of it is just, you know, if you are a Jew-hating Columbia student and you've got to get your little reflective vest, well, you probably go to the Walmart, right? Walmart's a great big store. It's got a lot of reflective vests. You go. So similar kind of thing here. If you are one of these guys, you go to this place that is really big and does lots of it, right? And plus, of course, it is, you know, here's a fascinating thing. So one of the billionaires that's of the many, you know, we have to remember the left has a lot of George Soros's. One of them is Pierre Omidyar. He made his billions at eBay, and he actually built up his own network of several different entities, not just his plain old foundation, but some other serious entities, Democracy Fund and whatnot. But in the last two or three years, even though he already has a network of his own, he started going through Arabella. Now, again, presumably, one of the values of that is not just that they're big and they have some skills at this, but also that when that mid-level of nonprofits, when they get money coming in, right, because like his foundation, if it gives money to one of those, it has to say that. Foundations have to say where they give their money. So he tells you why he gave it to the New Venture Fund. OK, but then you don't know on the base level, right, the bottom of the pyramid. So which of the literally 500 plus entities that New Venture alone has concocted, which one of those got the Omidyar money? Well, that you don't know. So that is a very helpful thing if you're a wacky lefty billionaire, so that you don't have your fingerprints on things. So that's another reason that the Arabella machinery is appealing, even to somebody who has billions of dollars and institutions of his own that he can, you know, use for the work. Could you go into how Arabella, is Arabella shaping public discourse through the media and to what extent? And then attached to that, what would the Democratic Party or the left wing of American politics look like right now without the Arabella network? Those are great questions. Let me start on the media stuff. I'm going to start with me finishing the story of Fix the Court, OK, that you'd asked about earlier. So to remind listeners, Fix the Court was the C3 of the pair of the of the pairing on court stuff with Demand Justice on the C4 side. So Fix the Court as the C3, it is not going to be buying $10 million of ads, attacking or supporting some SCOTUS nominee. What it can do, however, is the educational and issue based work. Right. So Fix the Court for years has been, and especially the last year or so, has been part of the pummeling of the Supreme Court. Now, Demand Justice is a little more overt about this. Demand Justice will flatly say there should be term limits for the court. Clarence Thomas should be forced to resign. We should have we should get rid of the filibuster. We should pack the court, blah, blah. Right. Your listeners are, I'm sure, very aware of the vicious, ugly, very hurtful to all Americans, not just the conservative side of the of the country with all these smears and attacks. Fix the Court is a little milder, but still very powerful. Right. So what are we talking about lately in the court? The biggest some of the biggest stories recently have been things like, well, Sonia Sotomayor traveled with a doctor at one point and here's her medical records. And, you know, she has diabetes and blah, blah. Right. Who got that out into the media so that that becomes a feeding friend? Fix the Court, as far as we can tell, the very first people to have gotten out into the public realm, some of those things. Now, the irony with Fix the Court is that it's really just one guy in his apartment. Right. I mean, again, all of this, the way you have to visualize it is the Wizard of Oz. Right. Dorothy goes to see the wizard. He's big and he's powerful and he's intimidating and he's going to affect your behavior. Right. And it's only when you pull the curtain back and you see, well, it's just some guy with a microphone or in this case, it's just some poor guy in a veal pen in a D.C. office working a Web site or buying Facebook ads. And leaking and leaking donor information. Yes. So, yes. So let's finish up the Fix the Court now. It is very important for me to say that after several years of my wonderful colleagues at Capital Research Center pounding the drum about all this Arabella nonsense, that both Demand Justice and Fix the Court were spun out of the empire and ceased to be just fiscally sponsored projects of one of those nonprofits. They became their own independent nonprofits because it was too embarrassing, I think, to be in the middle of the biggest dark money network. How is Sheldon Whitehouse going to smear and lie about the court when he's praising and working alongside two fake groups in the largest dark money network in America? So they spun out independent. Now, the funny thing about Fix the Court in that case is the first year that they're independent, they have to file their own IRS Form 990. That's what an independent nonprofit has to file one of those. Well, they filed a postcard 990, which is only legal if you have under $50,000 a year in revenues. It's like there's an income limit if you file a 1040EZ, right? Same thing. Well, the only problem with that is that one of my colleagues noticed, well, wait a minute, you got over $100,000 that year from your old sponsor at Arabella. So much for independence, right? Demand Justice and Fix the Court continue for years to get Arabella money. They're just not now legally part of Arabella. So, as I say, so I'm independent. But in the case of Fix the Court, they got over $100,000 from the Arabella people and they got over $100,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. Now, you know, I was not a math major, but I'm pretty sure that is more than $50,000. So when we discovered this, we went to a reporter and said, this might be worth your looking into. So that was Gabe Kaminski at the Washington Examiner, who's done wonderful work on this stuff. He called up the doofus in his apartment, you know, in his apartment being this grand Wizard of Oz thing. And he asked him about it. And the only thing I can say is go to Washington Examiner and look up Fix the Court. You will roll on the floor laughing. This guy has a total meltdown. First, he's like, oh, oh, oh, I'm going to I'm going to file amended returns. I'm going to file amended returns. By the way, for the lawyers in the audience, you know, any federal form that you put your name to with false information, that's a federal perjury charge. So he immediately refiles his amended returns and sends them to the reporter, Gabe. Now, the problem, though, is that he didn't redact the names of the donors because you have to you have to give confidentially to the IRS the names and amount to the IRS. But then when you give it out to the public, you're allowed to redact out the names and addresses of who gave you the money. He forgets to do that in his panic and and, you know, bad conscience. And so he sends that to the reporter and then he realizes what he's done. He calls reporters like, oh, my God, I'm going to lose my job. None of my donors will give me money if they're exposed. Oh, you've got please don't publish that other. Right. You know, I asked up, blah, blah, blah. I can't. So he has an even bigger meltdown. But what do you know together? He's melting down about having to reveal his donors, which is what he is screaming about with the Supreme Court and what Sheldon Whitehouse is. Good buddy is always screaming about the horrors of letting donors not be disclosed. Right. So you have all that. And then, by the way, that's not the end of the story. So the other thing that we point out to Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner after this is, you know, now that he's actually filed real 990s, he doesn't have any down there whatsoever for lobbying. And yet if you go to the Fix the Court website, there's a page with I can't remember what the number was, 10, 20 different campaigns that are grassroots lobbying. Well, so how's he reporting? He didn't spend any time lobbying. We need all this grassroots lobbying. So the bottom line is this guy, who, by the way, is repeatedly cited on Sheldon Whitehouse's website, is cited when Sheldon gives talks, was allowed to be on the op-ed page of The New York Times, is cited by The New York Times and The Washington Post time after time because Fix the Court, a nonpartisan watchdog, is saying that the Supreme Court's ethics are just terrible and there needs to be an ethics reform and they need to be forced to disclose, blah, blah, blah. And this is a guy who's lied repeatedly and utterly failed to disclose. And when he accidentally disclosed something, he tried to undisclose it. And it's just one goofball, right, that has been taken as if he's this brand, you know, Americans across the country are hounding the table and demanding ethics reform at the Supreme Court. I mean, you just can't make it up. It's one of the best stories in the whole book. There are a lot of others, but buy the book for the full story. So in shaping American media, would the work of, for example, ProPublica be another example of how stories get not only planted in mainstream media, but they're also driven by journalists that are directly on the payroll of 501c3s funded by Arabella. In the Arabella network, you know, I don't remember off the top of my head that that any of the Arabella network have given to ProPublica, although I'm just saying I can't I can't for certain remember that Arabella money went into ProPublica. But what I can say is, again, if you had an influence watch, type in ProPublica and you'll see all of these left wing billionaires that are doing all kinds of political fighting right against the Supreme Court, against people who actually want to protect the third branch of government and whatnot. So the same billionaire Democrat donors doing all kinds of partisan, overtly partisan stuff like that are also funding ProPublica. And I did I forced myself to listen to all three hours of the ProPublica smear job on Leonard Leo. And at the end of it, you get a long list of lefty entities that help ProPublica. I know our friends at Center for Media and Democracy run the Sourcewatch website. I know they were mentioned. I think some like Fix the Court of Demand Justice was mentioned. I have to go back and relisten to that. But but all of these folks work very tightly together and they all are doing the bidding of left wing billionaires, even though I'm told all the time that the left thinks billionaires should have nothing to do with our politics, nothing to do with our courts. Oh, it's just terrible. So your book is broken down into a series of case studies as well as providing a an overview of the way that Arabella advises these nonprofit funds. We're not going to have time, unfortunately, to get to all the case studies, but we wanted to at least focus on a couple to give our listeners a flavor for just what you're showing as the impact of this network on public policy, but also some areas where you just wouldn't think that Arabella's tentacles are reaching. But the first is sort of this misunderstanding of Warren Buffett. Right. The public perception of Warren Buffett is as this grandfatherly, wealthy funder of some great American business success stories. Right. You think Geico, Coca-Cola, you know, investing in America and sort of everyone who has an E-Trade or an Ameritrade account thinks they can be the next Warren Buffett with just a little bit of ingenuity and luck. Well, what you've done in your book is you've actually shown what Buffett has done with his pledge of 99 percent of his net worth to this space, including one of the major sources of his sorry, one of the major destinations for his largesse being the Hopewell Fund. And so you, you know, in 2020, learned that the Buffett Foundation became the single largest donor to the Hopewell Fund and Hopewell is known as the abortion arm of Arabella Advisors to the tune of six hundred and thirty five million dollars. What's going on with Buffett's support of this and why is this something that the public hasn't caught on to yet? Well, the public hasn't caught on to it because, of course, the mainstream media are not about to go tell you that some billionaire is the biggest backer of abortion stuff in America. Oh, no, no, no. That's the women of America demanding things. Again, you can't have the little dog pull back the curtain. It is a shocking thing. And obviously, Warren Buffett has done lots for lots of great American businesses. But sadly, abortion is apparently his obsession in the political world because his Buffett Foundation has given more than any other donor alive into the fight over abortion. And you're right. His money, most of his money goes through one of those mid-level entities, mid-level nonprofits, the Hopewell Fund. That's one of the half dozen of the umbrella nonprofits in the middle of Arabella's scheme. And it's just shocking. And by the way, not just abortion here, but also abortion and population control in other countries. In fact, some of the nastier abortion drugs will first get tested on the poorest of the poor in Africa because, you know, you don't have any rules and there's no FDA and rules and regs for that sort of thing. And again, the left, I mean, the left is what should be up in arms with this. And I am always told that big corporations are nothing but evil, always. And they exploit people all over the world and they don't care and blah, blah. Well, why isn't this a front page New York Times story? And do you think that has something to do with coordination behind the scenes? Well, I don't think they have to coordinate. Right. I mean, they're all in this together. You have to remember, the left aspires to be the board. So, I mean, there's a reason collectivism is a good word for these folks. You know, they say for them it's a nice it's a nice word. You never forget Obama. Government is the name for what we do together. You know, I wonder if there's just such an asymmetry, you know, in the same way that when we were discussing, you know, the Barry side gift to Leonard Leo and the Marvel Freedom Trust versus, you know, what goes on every year, you know, with just these entities, you know, in the Arabella network. I wonder if there's another asymmetry where right of center organizations need to expend more resources in in just sort of like the nuts and bolts of keeping their lights on and in keeping, you know, the organizations that they, you know, work for humming along versus the assurance that there will be a windfall of money that can sort of cover, you know, the nuts and bolts of keeping an organization running every year. And then all the all the, you know, the other funds on top of that can be put to use to advance other priorities as well as the core mission. Has that been something that you've seen at work in terms of not just the raw dollars that are going to right of center causes versus left of center causes, but just how these massive funds are able to cover the need, the needs for left to center organizations with with a lot more regularity and assurance? Well, you know, obviously, the Arabella model, one of the values of it is that you're going to have, you know, you've decided you want to have a little pop up group to fight on issue X or in state Y. Right. But it's not easy to find great marketing talent and, you know, political talent and this that. Right. So so if you're starting from scratch, de novo, you may go, gosh, you know, well, I just had my month. I'm letting my cousin do the PR because he's out of a job or, you know, I mean, you don't have the high quality professional stuff. One of the values of the model of Arabella is that they have all that ready and in waiting and you just have to walk through the door and say, here's the amount of money I'm willing to spend to fight to win a judgeship in North Carolina or to win a ballot initiative in Ohio or to fight for abortion just in general. All of the skill sets are already waiting for you and you just have to direct where they're going to go. So I think that's one reason that that Leonard Leo liked the idea of of organizing his network in a similar way. The Conservative Partnership Institute is another conservative group that has begun to try to do this sort of thing. So it's definitely not a bad model. One thing I will I will say about the conservative side, one of the it's in a way a bigger problem. I mean, it's it's related to what you're saying, but it's a bigger problem. Our side is great about research. Right. We have beautiful white papers. We have powerful regression analyses on and on. Right. And that and I don't say that's worthless. You know, that's reality. That's truth. That's our greatest ally is the truth. Right. But it is as any business guy can tell you, it's great to have a good product or service, but if you can't market it, it's worthless. It might as well not exist. I got the best car ever made. Has anybody heard of it? No. So nobody buys it. So I disappear. Doesn't matter. So our side has to be much more focused on the marketing of the truth that we're connected to and related to that. And again, something I praise the left on all the time, the left understands that the the most central word, the marketing story, the marketing is not, hey, let me walk you through this regression analysis. The marketing is, let me show you a woman in an inner city struggling with this problem because of this bad policy. And here's how we're going to fix that. Right. The left, the left stories are usually totally bogus in the sense that they're not, you know, what the moral of the story is utterly false. But man, they have victims. They have villains. That's us. And they have heroes. That's them. They. Pardon. So we have to be able to tell the stories of the victims of the left's policies, the people that are suffering because of the left's policies. And then we have to be able to explain how we have a way to help the people who are suffering. Well, maybe that's a good place to ask about the the other case study that caught our eye in the book, which was your analysis of not one of these fiscal sponsorships, but rather one of the 501C3s that Arabella, the Arabella network gives money to, which is governing for impact. You know, governing for impact, just for our listeners, has been particularly influential in recent years since the Biden administration came in at driving the adoption of the education mandates from the Biden administration. We're talking about, you know, changes to Title nine. We're talking about in K through 12, American public schools, you know, bathroom policies. How is the Biden administration leaning on governing for impact to facilitate these efforts, particularly in changing the nation's civil rights laws? Well, that's that is a wonderful question. And this is also related to how sharp the left is, right, that governing for impact was set up to overhaul the whole regulatory environment, not just education, interior, EPA, labor, on and on all across the entire federal government, the full regulatory agenda of the left. It was set up in 2019, two years before the first person was sworn in to the Biden administration. Right. By the way, in this case, it was 100 percent Soros money. There was a guy, Tom Perriello. He had been a one term Virginia congressman, then a failed gubernatorial candidate. And he ended up being head of the main foundation that Soros has. And he dropped a few million dollars into this project governing for impact. It was set up as one of the faith groups at the bottom of the pyramid at Arabella. And it was super secret. How is this? They had a website, but they had set the website so that no search engine could find it. You had to know the actual address. And if you type that into your computer, then you could get in. Right now, they literally did dozens of legal strategy memos for all these regulatory changes, because I can tell you as somebody who, you know, I was at the Domestic Policy Council under George W. Bush. The regulatory world is unbelievably Byzantine. It requires top notch legal talent. So what does this guy do? He goes to a buddy, the Soros donor here, the Soros Foundation head. He goes to a Harvard Law School prof. And by the way, you can't beat this. This guy testified right next to me to one of those Sheldon Whitehouse hearings on dark money, because, of course, this guy said dark money is horrible and it's taken over the court. You're right, Sheldon, right? Well, listen to his dark money story. This super secret group that this guy helps to set up. And by the way, he puts his daughter, a law school grad daughter in charge of it. And rounds up Harvard Law School talent, right, to be working on these strategy memos because you do, you know, are you trying to tweak a regulation? Are you going to try to issue a new regulation? You know, all these things, very complicated, you know, legal strategy questions. Right. And so you have all this brainpower going into it. They reach out to some of the various lefty groups as well to have their lawyers helping, depending on the issue. And you're right. The top thing that I would mention is an example I would give, although, according to them, within one year, 20 of these things had already been adopted and they had dozens more in the works. Right. So one of the most powerful ones, because it'll affect everybody with a child who could be in school, was the Title IX regs at the Department of Education that just a week or so ago got upended. And the way that for ordinary Americans who don't remember their Title IX number, men in women's sports, that's the headline issue. Although it also, if you're a lawyer, it also, the same reg affects how accusations of sexual harassment are dealt with on college campuses. Many people know those became kangaroo courts. The last Department of Education tried to require some due process for all the parties involved. Well, of course, you can forget about that now. Yeah, I remember when Betsy DeVos, then the education secretary, tried to just revert to an older policy. It was as if the sky was falling. Or even the temerity to require local police to be involved in any kind of accusations of sexual assault. You know, these universities became, you know, sort of their own fiefdoms when it came to the protection of constitutional rights or they were, you know, constitutional rights were suspended as soon as you stepped foot on a college campus. Well, they'd already done that for the First Amendment rights. So it seems only fair to do it for the rest of us. Well, as we wrap, we thought we would finish on a little more of a personal note because our guest, Scott Walter, was actually a student of our founder and co-director Hadley Arcus in the 1980s when Scott was a Georgetown University undergrad. For our listeners, Hadley Arcus actually took a multi-year leave of absence from Amherst College, where he taught for many years, to live in Georgetown and to teach at Georgetown University. And Scott had the pleasure of being his student. How many classes did you end up taking with him, Scott? I definitely took American Government with him. And gosh, that's a good question. I'm trying to think of the upper division ones. I'm getting too old and senile, but I know the first class was American Government, and there were multiple sections available. And I happened to notice his name, and the reason it stuck out to me is he had just written a magnificent cover story for National Review called A Lover's Lament for the Reagan Administration. I can still cite some lines out of that. And we now have a mutual friend. The guy who was in the Reagan administration who helped him with the article is a friend of mine now as well, Tony Dolan, one of the great Reagan speechwriters, still active, God bless him. And I sat in on one of the other sections of American Government, and I sat in on Hadley's, and it was not a hard choice. I dropped the other section. I joined Hadley's course, and we've stayed friends ever since. I would add that he and his wife attended my wedding in 1999. And then a few years ago, I attended his baptism. Yes, that's right. Quite the wonderful friendship over the years. Well, indeed, you know, it's a small world, but it's one of the special pleasures in life that once somebody is your college professor, it isn't the end of a relationship. It's just the start of a longer term, you know, friendship and engagement. And so many of us at the James Wilson Institute, you know, continue to be drawn together through the camaraderie that comes with just being in the same seminar or being in the same classroom. It's what we're doing at the Institute. We're trying to take those teachings of, you know, Professor Arcus and bring it to law students, lawyers, judges, you know, an audience beyond undergraduates. And so we like to think that, you know, this is, you know, the school that continues to grow. People like Scott, you know, who were there for some of those classic courses. There are plenty of echoes, Scott, in what you learned back then and then what we are still teaching today. Indeed. And Lord knows Hadley continues to be active writer, thinker, speaker. Well, again, the book is Arabella, the dark money network of leftist billionaires secretly transforming America from our dear friend, Scott Walter. Scott, where can our listeners follow your work on a more regular basis after they've read your book? Well, the two websites I always push CapitalResearch.org. That's our main site. And you can sign up for a weekly e-newsletter. I promise it's not a money begging letter. Here's our greatest hit of the week's research. You'll be overwhelmed with the amount of stuff, I promise. And then the other thing is every group I mentioned and every lefty group that you come across or lefty donor and the rest, go to InfluenceWatch.org and just type it in. You'll see all of what we're claiming thoroughly documented. Our rule is we don't say anything in public if we can't document it. But I do warn you, the first time you hit InfluenceWatch, you'll probably lose five hours of your life going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. I believe it. Well, thank you again, Scott. And we wish you well as your book continues to make the rounds. Thanks so much. It's been great to be with you, Garrett. And Elizabeth, great to meet you. Great to meet you, too. Thank you. This program has been brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. If you'd like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. Thanks for listening.