Peeling The Rotten Dark Money Onion Behind Misinformation Warfare – OpEd

By Joe Schaeffer*

If you still harbor any doubts that the term misinformation is nothing but a loaded partisan phrase meant to demonize opposition to the ruling progressive establishment agenda, dive into the dark money rabbit hole of a firm called Arabella Advisors.

“Arabella Advisors, run 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,” The Daily Caller noted in an exhaustive Dec. 26 report, “which donate to a variety of left-leaning groups, causes and Democratic candidates, according to tax filings and statements on the funds’ and Arabella’s websites.”

“Several funds within the network are also sponsoring research into the effects of, and how best to mitigate, misinformation and disinformation, according to a review of public grants.”

Money Makes the Misinformation Labels

The article does an excellent job of pecking at the various layers employed by Arabella to boost progressives in their sacred task of fighting disinformation in the name of saving democracy – the latter two terms, of course, being wholly defined through a distorted leftist establishment lens.

Let’s take a look at one spoke in this gigantic financial wheel. The New Venture Fund has a curious habit of aligning misinformation dragons with whatever appears to pose a threat to progressive policies at a given moment.

The sheer scale of networked money pouring into NVF is an eye-opener. “More than half of the 50 largest U.S. grant-making foundations have funded projects hosted at the New Venture Fund, including eight of the top 10,” the organization boasts on its website. The fund “in 2020 received the largest one-year commitment the [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation had made in more than half a decade,” Breitbart reported in May.

That month, New Venture Fund led the way in attacking Elon Musk, then in the early stages of his purchase of Twitter. NVF played a major role in organizing a pressure campaign urging a boycott of the social media site if Musk attempted to put an end to the rampant censorship operation deployed against conservative and anti-establishment opinion at the Blue Bird.

Of the 26 organizations that signed an open letter threatening the boycott over alleged misinformation, four were directly funded by NVF, Breitbart stated.

NVF also wields influence inside the halls of progressive establishment power. Ivy League institutions continue to hemorrhage the respected reputation they once held among the general public. Canoodling with rank partisans behind a threadbare veneer of academic integrity will only accelerate their decline.

From The Daily Caller expose:

“The New Venture Fund sponsored a project in March called ‘The True Costs of Misinformation’ at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, led by the center’s research director Joan Donovan, that sought to study the impacts of online misinformation, particularly on ‘vulnerable communities,’ according to the project’s description. The project included a workshop featuring several panels on different topics related to the alleged impacts of misinformation.”

A Shorenstein report on the event reveals a classic ruling progressive conundrum that, amazingly, it still cannot even grasp, much less begin to mitigate. Outlandish attacks on conservatives are immediately followed by mournful laments that “trustworthy” institutions are being tuned out by the American people.

“[A] new class of conservative elites, peddling conspiratorial and illiberal messages, have wrested control of the Republican party from traditional party leaders,” writes the Carnegie Council’s Steven Feldstein in his “research” paper for the project. The totally objective title: “What Is Driving Conservativism’s Post-Democratic Turn in America?”

“The conservative ecosystem’s illiberal transformation exemplifies the changing nature of trust, from institutional sources, overseen by referees, regulators, and authorities, to distributed models not bound by traditional strictures,” Feldstein concludes.

That’s a lot of hot air being blown just to whine about how nobody blindly believes in the credentialed class anymore.

Soros, Enron Dollars Unite to Serve ‘Media Democracy’

The Washington Examiner on Dec. 21 reported that Arnold Ventures, a powerful philanthropy created by Texas billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron executive, has poured millions into Arabella subgroups operating under the NVF umbrella. “The Media Democracy Fund has supported the government having more regulatory control over the internet and is a project of the New Venture Fund,” the Examiner relates. “Between 2016 and 2020, Arnold Ventures has donated over $13.5 million to the New Venture Fund, according to the Arnold Ventures grants database.”

“Media Democracy Fund was instrumental in the Left’s successful 2015 push to have the Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission enact net neutrality regulations,” the philanthropy watchdogs at Capital Research Center state. “Those regulations significantly increased the federal government’s control of the internet.”

Do we even have to mention that globalist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations is a “Funding Partner” of the Media Democracy Fund?

Make no mistake, this big money network represents fully functioning power. Controlling information has long proven to be an essential staple of all forms of authoritarian regimes. The progressive ruling establishment dark money machine works best behind the curtain. This is why a wildly popular public phenomenon such as the Twitter Files terrifies elites to their core. Sunlight is indeed – as always – the best disinfectant. The Capital Research Center puts it best:

“Given that many of the groups managed by Arabella frequently call for transparency in the funding of campaigns and policy advocacy, they may first consider voluntarily disclosing their own funding sources. Why shouldn’t transparency begin at home?”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for big-box media outlets and their associated “fact checkers” to follow the money as they breathlessly record the latest moral posturings of the deep-money disinformation dragon-slayers in defense of democracy.

*About the author: Political Columnist at LibertyNation.com Joe Schaeffer is a veteran journalist with 20+ years’ experience. He spent 15 years with The Washington Times, including 8+ years as Managing Editor of the newspaper’s popular National Weekly Edition. Striving to be a natural health nut, he considers staring at the ocean for hours to be an act of political rebellion.

Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation