Opinion – Bill Gates may have just set off the death of far-left-tainted philanthropy

News broke recently that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would sever ties with the shadowy consulting firm Arabella Advisors and its “nonprofit network closely associated with the Democratic Party.”

The Arabella network has received over $450 million in grants from Gates over the years, so this announcement comes as a devastating blow to Arabella’s billion-plus dollar network. But it may also be a sign that our hyper-politicized charitable sector has reached an inflection point. An institutional realignment may be coming that will leave the left in the lurch and change American philanthropy for the better.

My organization was the first outlet to reveal to the public the existence of Arabella Advisors and its network of in-house nonprofits. We literally wrote the book on Arabella — a book that features Bill Gates on its cover.

Our research, and that of many allies, dragged Arabella into the daylight, and Arabella has struggled with the unwelcome publicity. In a few short years Arabella has let go two CEOs (one shortly after she admitted to a reporter that Arabella was the “left’s equivalent of the [conservative] Koch brothers”), undergone an investigation from the D.C. attorney general, initiated a round of layoffs, and still faces a lawsuit from a woman apparently fired after she objected to what she viewed as a range of illegal activities.

Even though Arabella has built the largest “dark money” network anywhere on the political spectrum, donors have thus far continued to use it as a vehicle for more traditional apolitical charity as well. This provides Arabella’s political machine with a reliable cushion of consulting fees to get through the non-election years. This pattern repeats across the charitable sector.

Charities don’t just feed the hungry anymore — they now create “Racial Equity Dashboards” to “identify communities most disproportionately impacted by food insecurity” and provide “advocacy training” on “voter engagement work.”

Nobody can simply house the homeless — they must also work “collectively to influence and change policies and systems at all levels of government” by supporting rent-stabilization and anti-eviction policies.

Left-wing activism has thus been grafted onto the charitable sector so extensively that many of the sector’s leaders aren’t even aware of it — much like a Southerner insisting he doesn’t speak with an accent.

The Gates Foundation’s announcement is nominally about Arabella, but it hints that something much larger is happening. America’s largest private foundation is willing, even eager, to cut ties with Arabella, which shows that leaders at the highest levels of the charitable sector are becoming aware of how far left the sector has lurched and how that hyper-politicized charity may hurt their mission and reputation.

Gates’ decision is a sign of more to come. It suggests that conservative pressure tactics are sometimes able to tame big philanthropy.

Without the constant research and messaging of conservative investigators and their media allies, the Gates Foundation would almost certainly have kept giving the Arabella nonprofit network hundreds of millions of dollars for years, even decades, to come. It also didn’t hurt that the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nonprofit sector, has begun digging into alleged nonprofit abuses, or that the Trump administration is “targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world,” including Arabella, according to the New York Times.

Don’t expect the Gates Foundation to be the last major donor to grow cool on politicized philanthropy, and don’t expect Arabella to be the only loser. Where Gates goes, so goes the industry. The existence of his “Giving Pledge” alone is proof of that.

Big philanthropy made its bed with the left, but the Gates Foundation may become the first of many to get out of it. Starved of the corporate and foundation cash it has taken for granted for so long, Arabella and the rest of the left may find that bed a lonely place.

Scott Walter, author of Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America, is president of Capital Research Center.

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