Research: The Funding Ratchet

This page documents a funding method, not a team: the pass-through architecture that legally obscures who pays for advocacy and direct action. Every dollar figure carries a source; where a figure rests on an advocacy tracker rather than a primary filing, it is flagged as such. Characterizations — “dark money,” “weaponize,” “launder” — belong to the critics and trackers who coined them and are attributed to them, never adopted in our own voice. Donor-advised funds and fiscal sponsorship are legal; no illegality is asserted against any named person or organization, and no motive is assigned. The point throughout is the structure’s opacity, and that structure is symmetric — the left, the right, and foreign-state channels run the identical mechanism, held here to the same evidentiary bar.

The two networks below are documented at comparable scale precisely so that neither can be described as the anomaly. That symmetry is the whole defensibility of the page: the method is the variable that fires, the faction is not.

The method — two legal layers that hide both ends

The mechanism has two components, each legal on its own and far more opaque when stacked:

• A donor-advised fund (DAF) lets a donor give to a sponsoring charity that then re-grants at the donor’s “advice.” The ultimate donor’s name drops off the recipient’s disclosures — the money arrives from the sponsor, not the person. The giver is hidden at the top of the pipe.
• A fiscal sponsor lets a “pop-up” project operate under an umbrella nonprofit without filing its own Form 990. The project can run a national campaign while existing, on paper, as little more than a website. The spender is hidden at the bottom of the pipe.

Stack the two and both ends disappear: the donor behind the DAF, the operating project behind the fiscal sponsor. The result is provenance-obfuscation by legal layering. The reason this belongs in a book about control infrastructure is that the identical structure is wielded on the left, on the right, and through foreign-state channels — the tradecraft grades the structure (regulatory arbitrage), never the cause it serves.

The left network — Arabella Advisors and the “seven sisters”

Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consultancy, manages a cluster of nonprofits — the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, Windward Fund, North Fund, Telescope Fund, and Impetus Fund — that act as incubators and pass-throughs for left-leaning advocacy. The right-leaning tracker InfluenceWatch, which is used here to locate its opponents’ money and is flagged as such, documents the seven-entity structure, the fiscally sponsored pop-up groups that file no independent return, and the consulting fees the network has paid Arabella (InfluenceWatch — Arabella Advisors, right-leaning tracker).

The Sixteen Thirty Fund, the network’s 501(c)(4) political arm, files its own returns, which are the primary record for the entity’s scale (Sixteen Thirty Fund — Form 990 filings, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). One partisan account characterizes the umbrella as having facilitated roughly $1.6 billion in recent years — a figure that rests on an advocacy publication and is flagged accordingly, not asserted as a primary-sourced total (Washington Free Beacon — the $1.6B characterization, partisan outlet). The larger cumulative figures for the network (multi-billion combined revenue across 2006–2023) trace to the Capital Research Center / InfluenceWatch tally and should be treated as a tracker’s aggregate pending refinement against the constituent Form 990s, not as a settled number.

The right network — DonorsTrust, Leonard Leo, Marble Freedom Trust

The right runs the same structure at comparable scale. DonorsTrust, founded in 1999 to (in its own framing) “safeguard the intent of libertarian and conservative donors,” is the right’s DAF behemoth; its own filings are the primary record (Donors Trust Inc — Form 990 filings, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). The left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy, used here to locate the right’s money and flagged as such, reports DonorsTrust routing roughly $134 million to conservative groups in 2022 (Center for Media & Democracy — DonorsTrust 2022 flows, left-leaning tracker).

Marble Freedom Trust, controlled by the legal activist Leonard Leo, received a $1.6 billion transfer of company stock from the electronics-manufacturing figure Barre Seid in 2021 — one of the largest single political-donor transfers on record (InfluenceWatch — Marble Freedom Trust, right-leaning tracker). Adjacent to it, the Leo-aligned 85 Fund received about $20 million in 2020 and routes nearly all of its grantmaking through Schwab Charitable’s donor-advised fund — the same DAF layering described above, on the other side of the aisle (CNBC — the 85 Fund and its DAF routing).

The symmetry is the finding. Left and right run donor-advised funds and fiscal sponsorship to the same effect — the giver anonymized, the operating project kept off its own books — at scale measured in the billions. The tradecraft lens fires on both, identically, because it grades the plumbing and not the water.

The foreign variant — state channels doing the same thing

The state-channel version of the method funds foreign NGOs, parties, and media through government-adjacent conduits: USAID’s democracy-promotion grants, the National Endowment for Democracy and its European counterparts, and the German political-party Stiftungen. The structure is the same — a disclosed-in-one-country, opaque-in-another pass-through — with a sovereign rather than a private donor at the top of the pipe. The mechanism, and the host-country disclosure regimes that do or do not capture it, are documented separately in the foreign-influence apparatus component and in the nation-state ratchets research. The through-line for this page is only that the provenance-hiding structure is not partisan and not even private: it is a general-purpose tool that states run too.

The direct-action leg — funding a movement is not directing it

The sharpest test of the method is the money that reaches bail funds and mutual-aid cells, because that is where a funding relationship is most often characterized as an operational one. The documented instance in-corpus is the Atlanta “Stop Cop City” prosecution: in May 2023, Georgia authorities raided the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and charged three of its organizers with charity fraud and money laundering, and the September 2023 Georgia RICO indictment named bail-fund and mutual-aid organizers among its 61 defendants — prosecutors treating the funding apparatus as, in effect, the movement’s financial infrastructure (the money-laundering and charity-fraud counts against the fund organizers were later dropped) (Wikipedia — Stop Cop City, companion overview; documented in the lawfare tracker).

The bound this page holds, hard, in both directions: funding an organization whose members later act is funding, not a directed operation. A donor who backs a bail fund has not thereby directed an arrest, an arson, or a riot, any more than a donor who backs a designator has committed the deplatforming that follows. The record documents the money and the charges; it does not, and this page will not, convert a dollar flow into a command relationship.

The loop — the funding layer wires into the designation machine

The same donor infrastructure funds the organizations that designate, and — through the other side’s vehicles — some of the organizations that get designated. This is how the money layer becomes an input to the lawfare and deplatforming instruments that act on published lists. Kept symmetric and register-disciplined: “hate group” is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation, cited as theirs, never adopted here.

• The designator is donor-funded. The SPLC — whose own filings are the primary record (Southern Poverty Law Center Inc — Form 990 filings, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer) — reported roughly $129 million in FY2024 revenue against assets north of $800 million, underwritten by large donors reportedly including major corporations and foundation givers; those donor characterizations are attributed to the reporting and flagged as such, not asserted (Inside Philanthropy — SPLC revenue and donor base, archived). The Anti-Defamation League runs a parallel designation apparatus. Whoever funds the designator underwrites the list that becomes a lawfare or deplatforming input.
• The mirror — the other side’s DAFs fund the designated. By the SPLC’s own Hatewatch accounting, more than $23 million reached SPLC-designated groups through donor-advised funds (SPLC Hatewatch — DAF flows to designated groups, first-party accounting, archived); the outlet Sludge, flagged as a left-leaning publication, documented DonorsTrust routing more than $1 million (2015–17) to nine SPLC-designated groups, including the Center for Security Policy and the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Sludge — anonymized DAF giving to designated groups, left-leaning outlet).

So the left DAF infrastructure funds the designator and the right DAF infrastructure funds the designated — the same pass-through method on both ends of the same designation. The loop reads: donors → the designation machine (SPLC/ADL lists) → the lawfare and deplatforming instruments that act on those lists. The money layer is the upstream of the designation layer, symmetric on both sides. The personnel that move between these funded institutions and government are tracked separately in The Record.

The counter-argument

Anonymous giving is not inherently sinister, and a disclosure regime applied too broadly becomes its own abuse. Donor privacy protects unpopular causes from retaliation across the spectrum — the Supreme Court’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (2021) turned on exactly that risk — and pooled, sponsor-managed giving lets small projects operate without standing up a full back office. The defensible objection is narrower and procedural: it is the stacking of DAF and fiscal sponsorship to hide both ends of a flow that funds political influence, applied symmetrically to every source and every faction, with the disclosure question decided by legislatures and courts rather than by whichever side currently holds the subpoena. This page scores the plumbing. It does not, and must not, score the causes the plumbing serves, or the people the funded organizations claim to speak for.

Verdict

The funding ratchet is a method, not a team. Donor-advised funds plus fiscal sponsorship hide both ends of the money, and the left (Arabella and its seven sister funds) and the right (DonorsTrust, Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, the 85 Fund) run the identical structure at comparable scale, with the foreign apparatus (USAID/NED and the Stiftungen) as the sovereign variant. The same infrastructure funds the designators and, through the other side’s vehicles, the designated — wiring the money layer into the designation machine that feeds lawfare and deplatforming. That is why the honest object of study is the structure’s opacity and its regulatory arbitrage, never the cause. Everything above is documented at the flow level; nothing above converts a flow into a command.

Related research

• Foreign-Influence Apparatus — The Control-Grid Component — the state-channel version of the same pass-through method, plus the host-country disclosure regimes that do or do not capture it.
• Nation-State Ratchets — where USAID/NED-style funding sits in the broader inbound/outbound influence picture.
• Historical Precedents — Foreign Influence — the long record of funded influence before the DAF era.
• The Lawfare Tracker — the designation-to-litigation instruments the funding layer feeds.
• The Record — the personnel pipeline between funded institutions and government.