LETTER: ‘No Kings’ and its ‘dark money’

When millions of Americans flooded the streets in October 2025 under the banner of “No Kings,” the media celebrated it as a spontaneous grassroots uprising— the people rising up, organically, to defend democracy. But a closer look at the financial infrastructure behind those marches tells a far more complicated story.

Researchers at the Government Accountability Institute traced $294,487,641 in grants flowing from six major donor networks to over 100 official No Kings partner organizations. That’s not a grassroots movement. That’s a fully funded political operation, and American voters deserve to know who is writing the checks.

The breakdown, first published by Seamus Bruner and amplified by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), identifies the following major funding networks [Protest Impact Report]: Arabella Advisors (Sixteen Thirty Fund and affiliates), $79 million; Open Society Foundations (George Soros), $72 million; Ford Foundation, $51 million; Tides Foundation, $45 million; Rockefeller Foundation, $26–28 million; and the NoVo Foundation (Warren Buffett family), $16 million.

Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm managing a web of nonprofits including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, has become what critics across the political spectrum call the left’s premier “dark money” operation. It routes hundreds of millions of dollars to political causes while obscuring the original donors. Even the Bill Gates Foundation quietly cut ties with Arabella in August 2025, reportedly over concerns about its political entanglements. [Money trail investigation]

This isn’t a conservative talking point. Transparency in political financing is a foundational democratic principle. When the same class of billionaires who decry “oligarchy” funds the movements opposing it, that’s not irony; that’s hypocrisy with a nine-figure price tag.

“If the No Kings movement truly speaks for the people, it should be able to prove it doesn’t need $294 million from billionaires to do so.”

Funding an organization is funding its agenda. When you grant millions to Indivisible year after year, you are funding its capacity to mobilize its staff, its digital infrastructure, and  its ability to coordinate 2,700 events in a single day across all 50 states. Pretending those dollars exist in a sealed compartment, untouched by activism, strains credibility.

Sincerely,

Jim Outman

Owego, N.Y.