Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 100 – Arabella: The Left’s Dark Money with Scott Walter

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: Okay, so I would love to have some really witty great question, but I feel like we need to start with the overview. Help us, ground us in when we say Arabella, what do we mean?

Scott Walter: Okay, with the caveat that just a few weeks ago, they reorganized and rebranded. So we’ll get to that in a bit. But I will give you classic Arabella, old school Arabella, okay, which has been around since 2005. The easiest way to think of it is as a pyramid, okay? At the top of that pyramid is Arabella Advisors. That is a for-profit consulting company, PR company, Beltway Bandit, we call them in DC, right?

Peter Lipsett: Right, right, we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that.

Scott Walter: It creates and manages everything below it in the pyramid. Now in the mid level of the pyramid, you have half a dozen nonprofits of different legal types. And that’s where the money comes in, right? If you are the Ford Foundation or Zuckerberg or Soros, you write a check to those nonprofits in the middle level. And then at the base of the pyramid, you have what your viewers see, hundreds and hundreds of fake groups active in basically every issue area in American politics and all with wonderful names like, you know, Keep Iowa Healthy and Secure Michigan Elections. Well, that is a central part of this scam. They want you to think that a bunch of your fellow Iowans got upset about something and got together and are, you know, buying this, you know, they bought the Facebook ad you’re seeing right now. But in fact, of course, the guy who created Keep Iowans Healthy for Arabella, the website and the digital ads, probably never met an Iowan. And he’s just sitting at a desk in DC concocting a little website and logo to try to influence Iowa politics.

Peter Lipsett: I’m impressed at how succinct you kept that considering all the different ways we can go. Let’s talk about the, that middle layer for a second. I want to come back to Arabella Advisors, but that middle layer was five now seven, I think different entities, mix of 501(c)(3)s which are of course charitable organizations, 501(c)(4)s, which are social impact organizations. And they do crazy stuff. And, you know, so one of the original ones was New Venture Fund. I want to go back to the origins of this, you know, your book very nicely lays out, there were kind of two missions at the beginning, to kind of test the, I’m assuming, to kind of just test the whole model and see if it worked. And one of those you outline here about ATV trails, et cetera. Let’s not go into that one. Let’s go into the slightly more interesting one that you don’t cover much, which is, and I remember when this happened, there was an effort to get evangelical preachers across the country to, from the pulpit, give these sermons talking about Green New Deal before it was Green New Deal, right? The whole environmental movement from a Christian perspective. Talk to us about that. And I’m curious, particularly as an initial venture of all of this, did it have an impact and what did they learn from that?

Scott Walter: Well, you’re right folks on the environmentalist aspect of this because that’s still according to Arabella itself about a third of everything that they do. And those half dozen nonprofits have been for the, in this decade every year they take in about a billion and a half in revenue in those nonprofits. So one third of that’s a lot. Now the founder of all this is a guy named Eric Kessler. And his passion is environmentalism. In fact, he was radicalized as an undergraduate, which, you know, almost everybody who’s serious left was radicalized in high school or college. In his case, he listened to this nutty enviro guru who nonetheless was very powerful and important. He’d run the Sierra Club for years and in fact politicized it so much it lost its tax exemption. This was back in the 50s and 60s when you still could lose a tax exemption for being politicized. And then he goes on to create League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, et cetera. He was a real nut job. We can talk about him later if you like. But that radicalized young Eric Kessler, who hitchhikes all the way from Colorado to San Francisco to work with the guy. And then some, and not that many years later, Kessler is in the Clinton administration at the Department of the Interior run by, yes, a guy who had run the Sierra Club. Not the same nut job, another Sierra Club head. And as you said, in the 2000s, the left was making a big effort to try to seduce evangelical Christians into the environmental movement. And I have to think that when Arabella gets created in 2005, some of these names that you just rattled off are connected to this because the Arabella was one of the most important of the Pilgrim ships, right, of the founding era evangelicals coming to America on the Arabella ship. Another ship that came was the Hopewell, which is the name of one of the funds. And what year did the Arabella come to America? 1630, and there’s a 1630 fund. Then another fund is called Windward, which of course is a sailing term. So it’s very hard to believe that an enviro zealot wasn’t using these names in hopes of making it all seem warmer and fuzzier for evangelicals. Now, the short answer is, that thank goodness, even though they came up, I always have to remember now, what was this, what was the buzzword, creation stewardship? But sadly for them, they don’t seem to understand. Environmentalism in its radical form is a religion. And if you’re an evangelical Christian, you’ve got a religion. You’re not in the market for a new one. So it was not especially successful with evangelicals. On the other hand, as far as gobbling up billions of tax dollars, horribly hindering America’s ability to be energy independent, raising your electricity bills, those things, they’ve been very successful at.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, I did put a softer side on that conversation. And I remember it really created a lot of tensions and people didn’t quite know which way to turn. And it was an interesting time. It’s an interesting strategy. I mean, from a political science point of view, you know, it was clever. It was really, really interesting. Do the different funds, you know, when we’re at New Venture or Hopewell, I mean, other than them being some C3 and some C4, do they have different portfolios or are they just different parking lots that any car can go in?

Scott Walter: Well, the biggest one is this charity C3, New Venture Fund, and it’s pretty much is Walmart. But the others have some, you know, some differences. One of the most obvious is that Hopewell, for instance, a large chunk of what it does is in the abortion world. And by the way, most of the money there comes from somebody folks might not guess, namely Warren Buffett. His Susan Buffett Foundation is a huge donor in that area for Hopewell. The North Fund has something of a C4, as you say, a social welfare group is the technical legal term. Easy way to explain to folks is the NRA on the right is a C4. The League of Conservation Voters on the left, that’s a C4. There are a lot of C4s out there, even if you’re not used to hearing that nomenclature. You’d recognize the actual groups. And the North Fund has been very active in recent years, funding state ballot initiatives. And the reason for that is supremely for voter turnout work. The left realizes that one of the best ways to do voter turnout of their voters is to pick some issue, can be abortion, can be minimum wage, some others, and get that as a state ballot initiative. And then, yes, you want that policy victory if you’re a lefty, but much more importantly, you want to drive constituencies out to vote for that, who will then safely vote for the political candidates that are on the same ballot. The Impetus Fund and Telescope Funds, they have done a lot in other left-wing voter turnout efforts, even though the Telescope Fund is a 501(c)(3), which of course is not supposed to be doing partisan work.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, yeah. I have some more questions about those because those are the two newer ones. Even you published the book and then you had to do an update because these things always are evolving. But I want to go back to the New Venture Fund. You mentioned earlier, you said fake groups. I’m always a little, having been in the nonprofit world long enough, having worked at Americans for Prosperity that the left like to call the fake group, right. I’m always a little sensitive to that. But, you know, you mentioned in the book that New Venture Fund has supported at the time of writing 500 different organizations and still hosted 130 of them. You know, Demand Justice and Climate Action. Some of these are household, to a certain segment, household names. We’ve heard of them. They kind of have a thing. But that’s two of 130. There’s got to be, what are these groups doing? Are they medallion County Commission races? Do they have friendly names? You mentioned this Iowan group. Is that what this is? These lower level things that just fly under the radar?

Scott Walter: Well, yeah, some more names for you. Floridians for a Fair Shake. Opportunity Wisconsin. I think still Keep Iowans Healthy is still my favorite, I think. Who wants unhealthy Iowans, right? But the short answer is. Well, actually, there’s yeah, there’s an argument. There’s an argument. You’re right. I stand corrected. The…

Peter Lipsett: Nebraskans, I think, just Nebraskans. You…

Scott Walter: You know, the groups do vary some in the sense that, some might have larger constituencies than others, but there are just, you know, there are not, there are few, if any things like, you know, Turning Point USA, which has, you know, thousands and thousands of college kids, or even League of Conservation Voters, which, you know, or the Sierra Club, which have a lot of members. There are not many of those hundreds of Arabella entities where you’ve got thousands of actual Americans doing or caring about anything.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, I mean, it’s one of these things that really get my hackles up because the left likes to point to groups like AFP or even groups like NRA, right? And just call them AstroTurf groups. And you’re right. They’ve been built systematically over years and have lots of members. But these are real AstroTurf groups that don’t have backing, don’t they? Are the guy in Brooklyn. Have you found the guy in Brooklyn in the apartment? Like, do you know his name? Have you figured that out yet?

Scott Walter: Oh yeah, one of my favorites on this is a thing called Fix, because you mentioned Demand Justice earlier, which is one of the top groups fighting all conservative judicial nominations. But there’s another group as well that Arabella helped give birth to called Fix the Court, which really is one guy in a Brooklyn apartment. And yet, and yet, you know, he gets cited by the New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages. He’s testified in Congress. You know, the New York Times has let him, has published op-eds by him. And folks make it sound like, you you would think that there’s just thousands, maybe millions of Americans who want to fix the court, you know, just hate Clarence Thomas and, you know, horrified at the ethics of the Supreme Court. And it’s one guy in Brooklyn. And by the way, one guy in Brooklyn whose whole point is that there needs to be so much more transparency at the Supreme Court. And yet, you know what? He filed a little postcard IRS filing as a nonprofit, because he eventually spun out of Arabella independent. And his first year, he files a little postcard IRS filing, which you can only do if you get less than $100,000, sorry, less than $50,000 in revenues. And yet we were puzzled by that because you know what? We found two grants of more than $100,000 in that same year. So we add that to a reporter who called him up and the guy panics and freaks out and says, I’m going to refile, I’m going to refile, I’ll send you the new ones, right?

Peter Lipsett: 50, yeah.

Scott Walter: And then he refiles and sends it to the, and sends his new filings to that reporter. But then he calls the reporter back up. He’s horrified. Oh my God, I didn’t redact the names of the donors off of my filing. Oh my God, please don’t publish those. Now again, this is a guy obsessed with dark money controlling the court. There has to be donor disclosure everywhere. And yet he’s desperately trying not to disclose his donors after filing a false, wildly false form, right? Which by the way, that’s actually a felony. That’s felony perjury to file a federal form that’s untrue and put your name on it. And then by the way, there’s one more chapter of that. After those got filed, we looked at those and we said, well, it doesn’t say this group did any lobbying, even though there’s an entire page on the website filled with little campaigns of, you know, tell your congressman to do this, tell your congressman to do that, which is textbook lobbying, right? So, you know, you can’t make it up. That’s our guy in Brooklyn.

Peter Lipsett: Right? Okay, so let me push back then a little bit because if Arabella Advisors is so great, if it is this nexus, this central hub, there’s got to be somebody on the second floor whose job it is to just make sure everybody’s tax filings is right, right? Like, how does this guy screw up that much when you have, what are they paying all these management fees to Arabella Advisors for if there’s nobody to just handle that for them?

Scott Walter: Well, my short answer is being left means never having to say you’re sorry. Because I can tell you that amazing stuff happens. They’re in the middle of a huge lawsuit with a black woman who’s suing them both for racial discrimination against her, but also for retaliating against her and firing her after she went to her bosses saying, I don’t think you’re following the tax laws here. And I’ll give you her allegation. The gist of it is simple. There was a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit outside the Arabella network that apparently was being controlled by the New Venture Fund, which of course is a 501(c)(3) charity. And a 501(c)(3) charity cannot be controlling a C4. It can have friendly relations and sometimes it can give money to, but it can’t just control a C4. So that’s pretty amazing stuff. We’ll see how that lawsuit grinds out.

Peter Lipsett: So talk to us about these fees. I mean, you have a great chart in the book that shows just how much money flows back, presumably in management fees from Hopewell and North and New Venture and all of these back to Arabella. I mean, it’s 50 to $60 million a year. I don’t know. I mean, that could be big. That could be small, right? It sounds like a big number, but, you know, maybe there’s a thousand people at Arabella Advisors and you have to pay them all and keep the lights on, et cetera. So is that a lot of money? And what, I mean, somebody, seems like somebody’s making a profit off of all of this social impact, ostensible social impact.

Scott Walter: Sure, well, there is, as you say, there’s a chart in the book. And as far as the the revised edition, the paperback edition is what I’d urge folks to go buy because that has all the updates. And you’re right, in recent years, it’s been 50 to 60 million in management fees paid by its own in-house nonprofits to Arabella. And that’s, you know, the chart there goes all the way back to 2005 and it basically runs at about a 45 degree angle because as recently as 2019, the number was more like 35 million. So these are definitely, they may be doing horrible harm to the capitalist system, but they themselves are pretty impressive capitalists. And it’s very clear if you study the history, just how passionately they’re trying to drive those revenues up like good, good capitalists. But let’s put it this way, I am not aware of any other philanthropic consulting firm that is consistently turning 50, 60 million a year in revenue.

Peter Lipsett: Right, no. Yeah, the few that I know that are maybe in this vein on the left and the right, nowhere, nowhere in the ballpark of… How many people work at Arabella Advisors?

Scott Walter: Well, we haven’t gotten to the reorganization yet, but before the reorganization, the Chronicle of Philanthropy says it was about 425.

Peter Lipsett: That’s a lot of people.

Scott Walter: It probably double the size of the Heritage Foundation, just for one example, or the American Enterprise Institute, two big conservative think tanks, probably half that.

Peter Lipsett: And I imagine a lot of them have different hats and, you know, they’re a consultant, but then they’re also charged with running this campaign and that campaign and so forth. And I’m sure the payrolls get really, really funny over there. Let me switch topics a little bit to talk about one of your favorite things, which is foreign influence in all of this, because these are United States nonprofits meddling in United States issues. And yet people can use a United States bank account to give into these organizations, even if they’re a foreign national. That’s true of any nonprofit. But there’s a few, and one in particular I know who you really love, foreigners who we know are giving into these funds that are having a direct impact on things here in America. Talk to us about that and your favorite guy.

Scott Walter: Sure, well, as you say, my favorite guy is Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss national, although he spends most of his time in Wyoming. And he was, as best we can tell, he was the original sugar daddy for Arabella. As I say, they started in ’05, basically out of Eric Kessler’s garage. The first year that their nonprofit side broke the million dollar revenue barrier was ’07. Total revenues were about 1.7 million. One million was Hansjörg Wyss. Since then, he has given hundreds and hundreds of millions into the Arabella network. This drew the concern of one of our good friends, another good watchdog group, Americans for Public Trust, and they filed an FEC complaint because here’s the trick. If I’m a foreign billionaire, I cannot write a check to a super PAC. But I can write a check to a 501(c)(4), political nonprofit, and they can write a check to a super PAC. And so that was the complaint that Americans for Public Trust made to the Federal Election Commission. You can find in the book, you can find a link to the fascinating report from the FEC’s general counsel, which was 25 pages or so, recommending that the main C4 that he was giving that money to, the 1630 Fund, that it shouldn’t be allowed to stay as a C4 because really it was a PAC. And that therefore he should be, and Hans should be in trouble for essentially funding PACs. Now the FEC itself, of course, decided to do nothing because it exists to do nothing, but it’s an incredibly damning general counsel’s report. And by the way, the other funny thing is before he started giving to Arabella, he was just writing straight checks directly to the campaigns of people like Dick Durbin, which is of course wildly illegal, wildly illegal. Nobody has any debate. Unfortunately, as the general counsel noted, the statute of limitations had expired on that.

Peter Lipsett: Which is also illegal. Well, I’m so glad for him that he found another way to make that end run. I had not realized, I guess maybe in the back of my head I knew, but you talk about the Impetus Fund and these other C4s giving to PACs, which I did not realize was a thing that was possible because a C4 giving to a PAC, as you’ve just outlined, is a big leap from a campaign disclosure fund. Now, we could do a whole other podcast on what the right level of campaign disclosures are, and if we have too many or too few, and campaign finance is whole messy topic. Setting that aside, taking the rules as they are, how is it that a C4 is able to give into a PAC without having that real disclosure there? I mean, I guess the C4 is disclosed.

Scott Walter: Exactly. Although in the case of Impetus, which is an Arabella C4, their biggest grantee by far, in fact, virtually, you know, almost all their money in 2024 went to the Future Forward USA Action, which is itself a C4, but gives all of its money to the top Democrat super PAC. So you can’t, you know, you can’t make this up.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, it’s, I mean, and again, my hackles get up because so many arguments that we hear from the left to the right are you’re skirting campaign finance, you’re not a real nonprofit, you are, you know, being, all you do is give this money to that and that’s not right. It’s just very hypocritical. And, you know, I think about, so in Arizona, two years ago now, they passed this horrendous law, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, that essentially was trying to force, not force, disclosure to the very first dollar. Right? So if a donor-advised fund gives to a C3 that gives, loans money to its sister C4 that goes to lobbying, like all the way back, they want to disclose that. I have not kept up on how that’s working in practice, but you know, why, where is the bipartisan consensus that these are dumb ideas because both sides take advantage of these loopholes or however you want to look at them in the law?

Scott Walter: Well, you’re right. The left buries the needle in the hypocrisy meter. I have testified no fewer than five times to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who of course, yes, a favorite of yours and you are of course a favorite of his because your operating donor advised funds is horrible dark money, but the…

Peter Lipsett: Hmm. A Donors Trust favorite.

Scott Walter: Multi-billion dollar a year Arabella network, you know, I don’t think the word Arabella has ever passed his lips, despite my reminding him very thoroughly all those times about it. I will say after one of the testimonies, there was a particularly hilarious thing. I had been a little uncharitable about the Ford Foundation and he went on a podcast shortly, right after the hearing, you know, within days of the hearing to say, somebody was trying to say there’s something political about the Ford Foundation. Everybody knows there’s nothing political about the Ford Foundation. Now, mind you, where had I testified? The Senate Finance Committee, which decades ago wrote the fundamental law that still governs all of these things, right? What C3s and C4s can do politically and all this. The 1969 Tax Reform Act…

Peter Lipsett: Yeah.

Scott Walter: Passed by a Democratic Congress, right? And why? Because Democrats were outraged at the way the Ford Foundation was funding voter registration in Cleveland and bought the mayor’s race in Cleveland. So the man in the Senate Finance Committee is so ignorant of the tax law and the Ford Foundation that he doesn’t know the laws he’s talking about stem from outrage by his fellow Democrats at the Ford Foundation.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, there’s no requirement to know your history and certainly no requirement that you remember it when you get to the Senate floor. Okay, I want to get to the reorg in just a second, but you did note the Telescope Fund and I believe some of the others, right, actually have donor-advised funds as a part of this, right? Talk to us about that. Obviously, coming from DonorsTrust, very interested in that angle on it. What is the kind of scope of the donor-advised fund operation there? And, you know, in particular, I’m curious, at DonorsTrust, we don’t allow grants to organizations that take a lot of government money or work to grow government. National Christian Foundation hones its money towards evangelicals. What kind of rules are in place for those who have a donor-advised fund at Arabella?

Scott Walter: Well, you know, it’s a little puzzling because if you look at the application to the IRS to be a C3 tax exempt charity by the Telescope Fund, they claimed that they were going to be getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year within two or three years of being set up in 2021. And they said that donor advised funds were going to be a big part of this. And I imagine that the short answer to me of why they would start this is, as you well know, it’s wonderful to see Donors Trust growing. The biggest charity in America is the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, is also donor-advised funds. I mean, this is a gigantic growth sector in the philanthropy world. So Arabella are not dumb. They should be getting in on that business, right? So make total sense to set this thing up for that. But you know what’s strange is, if you look at the revenue stream, so it starts in 2021, in 2022 they take in about 30 million dollars, then in ’23 the next year they take in about 70 million dollars, but in this past year they only took five and a half million in. So it’s hard to know what’s going on but they, you know, it isn’t catching on or they were just lying about that was going to be one of the things it wanted to do. So if you do those numbers, right, so 30 plus 70, it’s taken in a little over $100 million. And its current assets are $28 million. So it did give a fair amount away those last three years, but it’s certainly not, your boss wouldn’t be happy if his revenues had dropped like from 70 to five. Yeah, not that.

Peter Lipsett: Hmm. I mean, he’s a forgiving man, but you’re probably right. New Venture Fund or any of these others, do they have donor-advised funds or was Telescope really created for that purpose?

Scott Walter: No. Yeah, no, no, Telescope was the one that supposedly was going to do big business in that, but may or may not, in fact be, that may or may not be panning out.

Peter Lipsett: Finding what we’re finding and you know it’s a more competitive landscape in the donor advised fund world and that’s really interesting. Okay we’ve teased…

Scott Walter: In other words, Fidelity Charitable is one of the biggest donors into the Arabella network, needless to say.

Peter Lipsett: I’m sure, I’m sure. No scruples about that. DonorsTrust is not a donor into the Arabella network. Just to be, if anybody has any confusion about that. Okay. We’ve teased this rebrand, this sunflower, you know, as so much on the left, it has changed its pronouns. It’s changed its name. It is now Sunflower Services. What the heck’s going on there?

Scott Walter: So here’s what happened with the reorg just a few weeks ago and we don’t know a whole lot about this. We only know parts but the gist of it is that I said there are about 425 Arabella employees according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy before the reorg. About 250 went to an entirely new entity called Sunflower Services. A lovely lefty name, right? Arabella might be a little scary sounding. Sunflower wouldn’t scare a five-year-old. So, and what supposedly the Sunflower Services, a new entity did is purchased the fiscal sponsorship business of Arabella. So that is operating the hundreds of groups for nonprofits. Now in a further twist, this new entity, Sunflower Services, is at least majority owned by the three biggest C3 charities at Arabella’s old empire. So New Venture, Hopewell and Windward Funds control a for-profit business that is going to be operating fiscally sponsored projects like Floridians for a Fair Shake. Now, that leaves us with about 175 employees at old school Arabella. And in that case, they just changed the name to Vital Impact, which again is less scary sounding. And apparently it is mainly going to be philanthropic advising, or so it claims. And so that is really strange because you have, I mean, it is technically…

Peter Lipsett: I mean, National Review…

Scott Walter: Possible for a charity to have a for-profit subsidiary. There are a lot of rules around that, but it’s possible.

Peter Lipsett: Is owned by National Review Institute. I think Reason Magazine is owned by Reason Foundation. So, you know, it certainly happens.

Scott Walter: Yeah, it is permitted with a lot of rules, but at the same time, Sunflower Services is apparently, well, the one old Arabella C4 political nonprofit that we know Sunflower is going to operate is the 1630 Fund, which is the biggest of the old C4s. So you’re going to have C3s owning a business that runs a hyper political C4 that’s going to keep giving millions to PACs and ballot initiatives. And so it’s quite an interesting thing. Plus, the other thing that’s in the paperback version of my book is that we learned that a few years ago, the controlling interest in Arabella, not 100% of it, but the controlling interest of the stock of the for-profit Arabella Advisors, was purchased by a billionaire’s family office, the Steens family, a banking family from Chicago, where, by the way, classic thing, daddy the patriarch who made the money, rock-ribbed Republican conservative, but the next generation, not like that, which is, you know why DonorsTrust was literally created to try to save people from having the family money go to future generations who would use it for left-wing causes.

Peter Lipsett: Right, billionaire or not, it can happen. Well, that’s good to know. I’m always in search of more stories that illustrate that point. So we’ll have to add that family into that. Okay, let’s kind of close with this. To a certain extent, so this is all fascinating. It’s all great. One could look at it and be like, all right, that’s great. But it’s a little gossipy, like, okay, we’re looking at all the movement and funny, isn’t that fine? That’s what the left does to us. Isn’t that great? Make the case for us why this really matters.

Scott Walter: Well, first of all, just the scale is no small thing. There is nothing left, right or center that equals the multi-billion dollar empire that we’ve been discussing. And in addition, you know, Arabella has had enormous influence on things like let’s take a very hot political debate, you know, boys and girls sports. That’s about an 80-20 issue, right? That’s not a Republican Democrat issue. That’s Americans don’t want that. But guess what? A tiny group that nobody knew existed until we found them. They literally had their website set up so that you couldn’t find it with a search engine, right? You had to know the address itself and then you could get in. Entirely funded for its opening years by Soros money. And it essentially was an operation at Harvard Law to strategize beginning in 2019 to strategize for the next administration, the Biden administration, how they would overturn all of the first Trump administration’s regulatory reforms, which included, you know, just energy deregulation and this, that and the other, but also included the Title IX regulation about boys and girls sports. And sure enough, what happens? They are completely connected to the Biden administration and they work with the Biden administration to reverse that, so that you had boys back in girls sports, which is a wildly undemocratic, you know, again, this isn’t like we hardcore right-wingers want this. 80% of America wants this. And yet a little Soros money, a little Arabella secrecy, and some back-channeling into the Biden administration, and too bad 80%, we don’t live in a democracy where 80% gets to have its choice.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, it’s, well, I commend you and Hayden and the rest of the team at Capital Research Center for the work you’ve done with the book, with all the work you do. I mean, this is a book, you know, it’s big, but there’s so much research that you all put out there. And there are other groups, you mentioned Americans for Public Trust, other groups out there working to show, open the books. Some of these other groups that are good government groups, good philanthropy groups in the case

of CRC, helping us understand what’s going on out there. The other side is doing that to us. That’s transparent, that’s what we want in a society is to know what people are doing. But the other side is really good at hiding a lot of this stuff. And so we really commend you, Scott Walter and the team there at CRC for the work you’re doing. Thanks so much for walking us through all this.

Scott Walter: Well, thanks for having me, Peter.